Cost, power consumption and performance evaluation of metro networks

Andrea Bianco (1) , Thomas Bonald (2, 3, 4) , Davide Cuda (5, 2) , Raluca-Maria Indre (5, 6)

1 Polito - Politecnico di Torino = Polytechnic of Turin
2 LINCS - Laboratory of Information, Network and Communication Sciences
3 DIG - Data, Intelligence and Graphs
4 INFRES - Département Informatique et Réseaux
5 LTCI - Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l'Information
6 Orange Labs [Lannion]

We provide models for evaluating the performance, cost and power consumption of different architectures suitable for a metropolitan area network (MAN). We then apply these models to compare today’s synchronous optical network/synchronous digital hierarchy metro rings with different alternatives envisaged for next-generation MAN: an Ethernet carrier grade ring, an optical hub-based architecture and an optical time-slotted wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) ring. Our results indicate that the optical architectures are likely to decrease power consumption by up to 75% when compared with present day MANs. Moreover, by allowing the capacity of each wavelength to be dynamically shared among all nodes, a transparent slotted WDM yields throughput performance that is practically equivalent to that of today’s electronic architectures, for equal capacity.

Keywords: Metropolitan area networks; Optical networks; Power consumption; Performance evaluation

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Modeling and Simulation; Computer Science [cs]; Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI]

Andrea Bianco, Thomas Bonald, Davide Cuda, Raluca-Maria Indre. Cost, power consumption and performance evaluation of metro networks. Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, 2013, 5 (1), pp.81-91. ⟨hal-00784181⟩