Wired Core & Access Networks Working Group Projects
Bit-Interleaved Passive Optical Network Technology
The GreenTouch Consortium’s second major milestone is breakthrough Bit-Interleaved Passive Optical Network (Bi-PON) technology. When deployed, it will enable a power reduction of 30 times over current technologies while improving performance and reducing cost.
REPTILE (Router Power Monitoring)
The aim of this project is to provide a detailed power profile of a range of network equipment, such as IP-routers, Ethernet switches, SDH/SONET cross connects and OTN cross connects. The project will develop power measuring hardware and software that will provide overall power consumption data as well as sub-system power consumption data based on measurements of real equipment.
CROCODILE (Content Distribution and Clouds for Service Delivery)
The objective of the project is to provide a systematic approach for quantifying the energy efficiency of a range of cloud services, and to identify the optimum balance between performing tasks on the cloud relative to using local computing resources.
OPERA (Optimum End-to-End Resource Allocation)
Power saving in communication networks is proposed through optimum end-to-end resource allocation. Currently, networks are typically three to five times over-provisioned to maintain Quality of Service (QoS). This project will investigate the optimum allocation of these resources in a network in a dynamic fashion to reduce the networks power consumption. Future extensions can examine the optimum allocation of other resources, such as processing, storage, switching and routing.
STAR (Switching and Transmission)
The STAR project participants will study the optimization of the physical topology of IP over WDM networks with the objective of minimizing the total power consumption of the network. Given the large disparity between the power consumption of the IP and the optical layers, they plan to introduce power saving through architectures that employ transmission and switching more than IP routing, leveraging recent progress in low-power large photonic switch architectures.
SCORPION (Single Chip Line Card Router with Photonic Integration)
This project will focus on silicon-photonic interconnects to reduce the power consumption in the interconnect structure by bringing the optical interface as close as possible to the electronic processing. Further, the project aims at designing, developing and prototyping a single chip line card that can handle all the router/packet processing functionalities that currently are spread over multiple chips.
SEASON (Service Energy Aware Sustainable Optical Networks)
This project is a clean-slate core network design project that is focused around a few basic design principles and provides an underlying dynamic wavelength capability as a basis upon which other projects can build. The main driving principle for SEASON is that deep energy savings can be realized by designing the network end-to-end optimized for key high-bandwidth services. In addition, SEASON targets energy savings in the Physical Layer through dynamic wavelength capabilities.
HALF MOON (Highly Adaptive Layer for Meshed On-Off Optical Networks)
This project focuses on the optimization of the optical network energy efficiency by investigating the impact of 1) new transmission technologies, such as elastic data-rate devices, 2) the introduction of new device characteristics, such as the possibility of complete or partial switch-off of optoelectronic devices, and 3) the implementation of new protocols so that the global amount of energy required by the optical network to transport a determined amount of data (following temporal evolution) is reduced.
Low-Energy Architecture
The main goals of this research project are to identify the access solution with the lowest possible energy consumption for the scenario where a PON-based fiber infrastructure is available, and for a greenfield scenario where there is no existing infrastructure.
Virtual Home Gateway (VHG) and Quasi-Passive CPE
This project investigates how to improve power consumption in customer premise equipment. The CPE provide the interworking functions between the access network and the home network, consuming more than 80% of the total power in a wireline access network. The present project aims at a drastic reduction of the power consumption by means of a passive or quasi-passive CPE. Such approach requires that typical home gateway functions, such as routing, security, and home network management, are moved to a virtual home gateway (VHG) on a server in the network.
