Energy Aware Scheduling and Routing of Periodic Lightpath Demands in Optical Grid Networks

Optical grid networks provide an ideal infrastructure to support large-scale data intensive applications and interconnection of data centers. The power consumption of communications equipment for such networks has been increasing steadily over the past decade and energy efficient routing schemes and traffic models can be utilized to reduce the energy consumption. In many applications it is possible to select the destination node from a set of possible destinations, which have the required computing/storage resources. This is known as anycasting. We propose a novel formulation that exploits knowledge of demand holding times and the flexibility of anycast routing to optimally schedule demands (in time) and route them in order to minimize overall network energy consumption. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach can lead to significant reductions in energy consumption, compared to traditional routing schemes.