Blending photons with electrons to reduce the energy footprint of IPTV networks

© 2016 IFIP. The rapid growth of IPTV services and the resulting increase in traffic volumes is raising concerns over energy consumption. In this paper we propose to save energy by shifting particular IPTV traffic from power-hungry electronic routing to greener optical switching. The traffic profile of IPTV results in such a hybrid switching approach to allow both energy and bandwidth efficiencies. To achieve this goal we designed a novel protocol that allows the use of optical bypass in IPTV networks. By means of a trace-driven analysis of a large dataset we demonstrate the energy efficiencies obtained to be substantial, reaching power savings of over 40% under normal load conditions. This result represents a four-fold increase in energy efficiency when compared with recent proposals