Green multicast grooming based on optical bypass technology

With the network traffic increasing, the energy consumption of network equipments is growing greatly. Under the background of serious greenhouse effect, the excessive energy consumption has become a major barrier of developing the future information society. For this reason, the issue of saving energy followed by the grooming and optical bypass technology has become particularly important. In this paper, in order to perform the energy-saving for multicast demands, we present the multicast grooming policies and also develop a new auxiliary graph to support the multicast routing in green optical network. Based on the proposed auxiliary graph, a novel Multicast Green Grooming (MGG) approach by using the energy-efficient optical bypass technology and the effective grooming policy combination is proposed to reduce the occupied energy-consuming equipments that mainly include the core router ports, optical transceivers and amplifiers. Simulation results show that, compared to the traditional approach, MGG not only can obtain the lower blocking probability but also is able to save significant energy.

Research highlights
► The average energy consumption (AEC) of MG.3 is the lowest by using optical bypass.
► The AEC of MG.2 is the highest.
► The AEC of MGG is the medium and is essentially identical with that of MG.1.
► The AEC is gradual reducing with the network load increasing.