Power-Aware Design of the Optical Interconnect for Future Data Centers

The volume of traffic carried on the Optical Transport Network (OTN) is continuously growing, not only due to the increase of new services, new applications, and the number of both connected users and smart devices, but also owing to the rapidly growing Data Center Interconnect (DCI) market. As a result, telecom operators need to upgrade their transport networks to cope with these new traffic requirements. This tremendous increase in bandwidth demand will also introduce energy bottlenecks in OTNs. The telecommunication networks' significant Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GGE) is another challenge that must be addressed in OTN design and planning policies. Thus, energy-efficient OTN architectures are currently attracting the attention of telecom operators. The candidate OTN architectures are: (1) the conventional Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) fixed grid with high Single Line Rates (SLRs); (2) the conventional DWDM fixed grid adopting Mixed Line Rates (MLRs); and (3) the Elastic Optical Network (EON) or flexigrid-based architecture which is enabled by the Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (O-OFDM) technique. This paper evaluates the power consumption of the abovementioned OTN architectures under different traffic loads and patterns, as well as different network physical topologies. In order to perform the evaluation, new heuristic algorithms are specifically developed for the green design and planning of data center optical interconnects.