Tabu Search Energy Optimization of Optical Grid Networks

The exponential growth in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector has resulted in increased power consumption and there is growing recognition of the need to develop more energy efficient networks. It has been shown in the literature that energy aware routing schemes for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks can significantly reduce the overall energy consumption on the network. Much of the recent work has concentrated on switching off the unused network components during low utilization periods. In this thesis, we present a comprehensive heuristic algorithm that performs routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) and minimizes the overall energy consumption of a set of static lightpath demands, using Tabu search principle. We consider both unicast and anycast traffic models and investigate whether the additional flexibility of anycast routing can be exploited to further reduce network energy consumption