OPEX Savings Based on Energy Efficient Strategies in NREN Core Optical Networks

Ioan Turus
SpeakerIoan Turus
TrackTrack 1 -- Lecture Hall X on the First Floor
DescriptionThe common practice for optical network operators today is to deploy optical resources based on over-provisioning towards the maximum expected amount of traffic in the network. This is a safe strategy and it takes into account the currently static nature of the optical network design, where new wavelengths and new circuits are established based on a pre-defined dimensioning plan.However, because of the continuous increase in the overall traffic demand (estimated to be between 16% and 33% per year) as well as due to the more and more heterogeneous behavior of the incoming requests – the over-provisioning deployment strategy becomes less and less efficient. This is a challenging aspect especially in NREN environments where new and state of the art services are being proposed or requested (e.g. Photonic Services) and their requirements are often hard to be predicted. Moreover, in terms of energy consumption, significant savings can be obtained and accounted into OPEX (Operational Expenditure) by taking into account a more efficient usage of the opto-electronic resources (such as transponders or regenerators).
There are more strategies proposed in the literature to enhance the energy consumption in core optical networks. One proposal is to define different operational states for the opto-electronic components – OFF, IDLE and ON – which correspond to different levels of energy consumption. Another solution is to use advanced transponder architectures (i.e. elastic or flexible transponders) which are able to tune the symbol-rate of an optical circuit and thus determine a variable consumption for the transponder.
The goal of this study is to estimate the challenges and the possible OPEX savings that can be achieved by NRENs when implementing energy efficient strategies based on OFF/IDLE/ON states and elastic transponders in their core optical networks.

Presentation documents

All talks