Energy-efficient lightpath establishment in backbone optical networks based on ant colony optimization

Energy-aware lightpath routing and establishment in optical backbone networks can reduce energy consumption while preserving performance levels. A heuristic method based on ant colony optimization (suitable for both network planning and operation) is proposed that reduces network's energy footprint by exploiting the basic principles of Swarm Intelligence for finding the most energy-efficient routes from source to the destination node per traffic request and at the same time, for reducing computational complexity to a polynomial level. The reduction of energy consumption is achieved in comparison to other related heuristics under representative backbone network topologies and their actual traffic demand. IP over WDM optical networks are considered for evaluating the performance along with the next generation elastic networks.