Energy Efficiency of Hybrid Optical Switching

Hybrid optical switching (HOS) has the potential to provide highly efficient operation through combiningvarious switching paradigms and different implementation options within the same network. The flexibility ofchoosing between circuit, packet or burst switching and electronic or optical implementation results in animprovement in both energy and data transport efficiency because the most appropriate method and less powerconsuming elements can be selected and used for transmission of data through the network while inactiveelements are switched off or put in a low-power mode. In this paper, we propose a novel network concept thatwe refer to as adaptive hybrid optical switching (AHOS) and present and investigate several architectures andrealization options for AHOS nodes. The corresponding control plane comprises two layers, of which oneimplements routing, signalling and link management functions as defined in the GMPLS standard while theother one is responsible for managing already established circuits and scheduling the transmission of packetsand bursts. We present results on both performance and energy consumption for different AHOS noderealizations, network configurations and traffic patterns, which prove the potential for a high improvement inenergy efficiency from 100% to approximately 1,000% with respect to the conventional electronic packetrouters.