Towards large-capacity, energy-efficient, and sustainable communication networks - Network topology research for dynamic optical paths

Internet traffic continues to increase due to the growth of video-related communication services. Such video-related services are expected to support future advanced communication services such as tele-presence based on real-time high resolution bidirectional video communication, tele-diagnosis, and remote education. However, the risk of an energy crunch in communication networks is increasing with the increase in traffic since energy consumption of current IP router based networks depends on traffic volume. In this paper, we present a network architecture, called dynamic optical path network (DOPN), whose energy scaling is much less dependent on traffic volume than that of the current networks. This paper demonstrates the validity of DOPN to realize greater bandwidth, national- scale, and energy-efficient network, by defining detailed network topologies and node architectures of DOPN.