Energy efficiency of optical grooming of QAM optical transmission channels.

Analysis of the energy use for optical grooming of quadrature amplitude modulated signals in optical transmission systems is used to determine the potential efficiency benefits. An energy model is developed for both optical and electronic grooming and used to study the relative efficiency for three different network scenarios. The energy efficiency is evaluated considering both coherent and direct detection transceivers including power management strategies. Results indicate efficiency improvements up to an order of magnitude may be possible for 100 GBaud rates and 25-30 GBaud is a critical point at which optical grooming becomes the more efficient approach. These results are further shown to apply for the case of projected efficiency improvements in the underlying device technologies.

Energy challenges in optical access and aggregation networks.

Scalability is a critical issue for access and aggregation networks as they must support the growth in both the size of data capacity demands and the multiplicity of access points. The number of connected devices, the Internet of Things, is growing to the tens of billions. Prevailing communication paradigms are reaching physical limitations that make continued growth problematic. Challenges are emerging in electronic and optical systems and energy increasingly plays a central role. With the spectral efficiency of optical systems approaching the Shannon limit, increasing parallelism is required to support higher capacities. For electronic systems, as the density and speed increases, the total system energy, thermal density and energy per bit are moving into regimes that become impractical to support-for example requiring single-chip processor powers above the 100 W limit common today. We examine communication network scaling and energy use from the Internet core down to the computer processor core and consider implications for optical networks. Optical switching in data centres is identified as a potential model from which scalable access and aggregation networks for the future Internet, with the application of integrated photonic devices and intelligent hybrid networking, will emerge.