Highly Energy Efficient Layer-3 Network Architecture Based on Service Cloud and Optical Aggregation Network

The Internet is an extremely convenient network and has become one of the key infrastructures for daily life. However, it suffers from three serious problems; its structure does not suit traffic centralization, its power consumption is rapidly increasing, and its round-trip time (RTT) and delay jitter are large. This paper proposes an extremely energy efficient layer-3 network architecture for the future Internet. It combines the Service Cloud with the Cloud Router and application servers, with the Optical Aggregation Network realized by optical circuit switches, wavelength-converters, and wavelength-multiplexers/demultiplexers. User IP packets are aggregated and transferred through the Optical Aggregation Network to Cloud transparently. The proposed network scheme realizes a network structure well suited to traffic centralization, reduces the power consumption to 1/20–1/30 compared to the existing Internet, reduces the RTT and delay jitter due to its simplicity, and offers easy migration from the existing Internet. key words: power consumption, service cloud, optical aggregation, cloud router, future network