Energy-oriented models for WDM networks

A realistic energy-oriented model is necessary to formally characterize the energy consumption and the consequent carbon footprint of actual and future high-capacity WDM networks. The energy model describes the energy consumption of the various network elements (NE) and predicts their energy consumption behavior under different traffic loads and for the diverse traffic types, including all optical and electronic traffic, O/E/O conversions, 3R regenerations, add/drop multiplexing, etc. Besides, it has to be scalable and simple to implement, manage and modify according to the new architecture and technologies advancements. In this paper, we discuss the most relevant energy models present in the literature highlighting possible advantages, drawbacks and utilization scenarios in order to provide the research community with an overview over the different energy characterization frameworks that are currently being employed in WDM networks. We also present a comprehensive energy model which accounts for the foreseen energy-aware architectures and the growth rate predictions which tries to collect the main benefits of the previous models while maintaining low complexity and, thus, high scalability. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.