Comparing Power Consumption of Networks Employing Different Optical Networking Techniques

Abstract

This thesis has put the light on the power consumption in network systems. The power consumption of ICT systems have lately been an interesting and important topic worldwide. The growth of Internet has expanded and up til now the main focus has been on quality of service (QoS). This thesis shares the result of an evaluation of four different methods (optical non-bypass, optical bypass, optical multihop and OpMiGua) for reducing the power consumption in network systems, considering optical networks. For all the four methods three different test scenarios have been proposed, which have given different traffic matrix and network size. The Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm has been used in all the test scenarios to get from the source to the destination in shortest time. IP Router, EDFA and Transponder are network elements which have been taken into consideration in our calculations. From the calculations we conclude that optical non-bypass is the method that uses most power and which was least efficient in all the three test scenarios. The results from the other three methods were more similar. We conclude that OpMiGua is the most power efficient method for most cases in the three test scenarios, but the result was not outstanding compared to the result from the two methods bypass and multihop. To verify the results in real life, there are some other network elements which should be taken into consideration in the calculations. For instance are the IP routers put into sleep while not in use, is there different traffic demand and so on.