Earthquake Tolerant Energy Aware Algorithms: A New Approach to the Design of WDM Backbone Networks

Abstract

The increasing energy cost of networking facilities, in conjunction with environmental instability and climate change, have led to many research efforts targeting the reduction of the energy consumption in telecommunication networks. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks is the key solution for the continuously growing bandwidth demands of backbone networks. However, the rise of traffic has led to the augmentation of energy consumption in such networks. Moreover, backbone networks in countries with high seismicity suffer from unexpected link failures caused by earthquakes, which in turn, cause a huge amount of bandwidth loss and service disruptions. In this paper, a new power aware algorithm is introduced, which uses actual seismic information in order to maintain tolerant connectivity of the backbone network after a large scale earthquake occurs, while supporting energy efficiency. The objective of this paper is the design of a power and earthquake aware WDM backbone network, by establishing the minimum number of backup links in the virtual topology in order to maintain tolerant connectivity. The proposed scheme is evaluated via extensive simulation results by using actual seismic information provided by the Geodynamic Institute of the National Observatory of Athens, and it is verified that both goals of earthquake tolerance and energy efficiency are achieved.