Energy Efficient Optical Networks with Minimized Non-Renewable Power Consumption

Recent studies have shown that the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry is responsible for about 2% of the global emission of CO2 and this percentage is expected to increase as the internet expands in bandwidth and reach. In this paper we propose a hybrid-power IP over WDM network where renewable energy is used to reduce the CO2 emission of IP overWDM networks. ALinear Programming (LP) model and a novel heuristic are developed to minimize the non-renewable power consumption in the “hybrid-power” IP over WDM network. The performance of the network is studied considering two topologies, the NSFNET and the USNET. Compared with routing in the electronic layer, the results show that routing in the optical layer coupled with using renewable energy significantly reduces the CO2 emissions of the IP over WDM network by up to 73% for the NSFNET and 69% for the USNET, and the proposed heuristic has little impact on the QoS. We also develop an LP model to identify the impact of the location of nodes employing renewable energy on the non-renewable power consumption of the network. The results show that the optimum location of nodes employing renewable energy is determined according to the output power of the renewable energy sources and the power consumption of the nodes.