Cognitive Power Management in Long-Haul Optical

Systems
Valery N. Rozental and Darli A. A. Mello
OCNLab, University of Brasilia
e-mail: valery@unb.br

Abstract: We present a scheme for efficient power control in optical transponders, based on
length reduction of electronic chromatic dispersion compensation filters according to network
traffic fluctuations. Rate reduction is achieved by symbol retransmission to avoid complexity.
OCIS codes: (060.0060) Fiber optics and optical communications; (060.4510) Optical communications.

1. Introduction
Commercial product development for 100G optical systems raised an important issue of power consumption in
optical transponders, leading to single chip ADC/DSP solutions, use of advanced CMOS processes and optical
integration. However, online-reconfigurable transponders able to adjust to the changing transmission and network
conditions require high complexity DSP, extremely challenging for current technologies. This is, mainly, due to
elevated power consumption in comparison with custom hardwired logic [1]. Our objective is to obtain a noteworthy
power efficiency improvement by attributing some degree of cognition to optical transponders, while maintaining
their operational parameters unchanged, to avoid complexity.
We present a previously proposed (in [2]) scheme, Cognitive Power Management (CPM), for transmission rate
adjustment according to network traffic fluctuations. CPM allows reducing system power consumption associated
with chromatic dispersion (CD) compensation.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 analyzes the computational complexity of CD
compensation, Section 3 describes the cognitive power management scheme and Section 4 concludes the paper.
2. Computational complexity analysis of electronic CD compensation
Figs. 1(a-b) show, respectively, daily and weekly fluctuations of the aggregate internet traffic for all exchange points
between autonomous systems networks (ASNs) in Brazil [3]. There exists a substantial fluctuation between the
daytime and the nighttime traffics. Weekly traffic also exhibits fluctuations, having a reduction of almost 40%
during weekends. Although actual values may vary from one link to another, the general pattern of these graphs
should remain similar. In long-haul transmission, these fluctuations are not considered, and systems operate at the
constant nominal rate to accommodate the highest traffic load. However, lower transmission rates allow reducing the
length of the digital filters used for CD compensation. This reduction, in turn, results in lower power consumption.

70
Traffic rate [Gbps]

60 Weekend
50
40
30
20
10
00
08 12 16 20 00 04 08 Hour 21 22 23 24 Date
(a) (b)
Fig. 1. Fluctuation of the aggregate internet traffic between ASNs
CD compensation filter size, , may be computed as [4]:

(1)

where is the accumulated CD, is the carrier wavelength, is the sampling time and is the speed of
light. Further 40% reduction of in (1) results in only a small performance penalty [4] and, therefore, is applied
in the subsequent computations.
The number of non trivial real multiplications, , (used as a complexity measure) for a given FFT size, ,
depends on FFT algorithm and degree of optimization. For radix-2 optimized Cooley-Tukey algorithm and three real
multiplications per complex one, can be computed as [5]:

(2)
Note that to avoid aliasing [6]. A number of real multiplications per filtering cycle is given, therefore,
by:
(3)

where is the number of polarizations. In (3) is multiplied by 2 to account both for FFT and IFFT, and is
multiplied by 3 as three real multiplications are required for each complex one. The number of bits resulting from
each filtering cycle is , where is the number of equalized samples in one polarization
resulting from one cycle, is the oversampling factor and M is the size of the modulation alphabet. The number of
multiplications per transmitted bit is computed as:

(4)

Note that does not depend on number of polarizations. It is also a function of , whose value may be
optimized. Fig. 2(a) shows as a function of for , modulation format PM-QPSK and . The
red asterisks represent possible values and the green square indicates the optimum value, . Finally, the
number of real multiplications per second is , where is the effective bit rate. Fig. 2(b) shows for
CD compensation in a 2000 km uncompensated link with nm and fiber dispersion parameter
ps/nm/km, employing PM-QPSK with . The computation is based on (4) with optimized FFT size and a 7%
forward error correction overhead.

42

NF = 2NCD= 512 Real multiplications per second

40
Real multiplications/bit

38 12
10

36

34
opt
N = 2048
32 F

11
30 3 4 10
10 10 12.5G 25G 50G 100G
FFT size Nominal transmission rate using PM-QPSK
(a) (b)
Fig. 2. FFT optimization and complexity for different transmission rates

Figs. 1-2 suggest that computational complexity and, consequently, power consumption due to CD compensation,
may be reduced if the transmission rate varied according to the internet traffic fluctuations.
3. Cognitive Power Management scheme
We consider a 100G long-haul optical link with IP routers connected to optical line interfaces by 1 Gb/s and 10 Gb/s
Ethernet interfaces. The CPM line interface is able to multiplex the incoming information into a payload of up to
100 Gb/s and map into an optical channel for transmission.
CPM is based on repeating the transmitted symbols when a sufficiently low traffic flow is detected. The number
of repetitions per symbol, , results in transmission at the following rates (Fig. 3(a)): 12.5G,
25G, 50G and 100G, based on the traffic demands. At the receiver, the sequence is downsampled as shown in Fig.
3(b). The figure depicts a transmission of two samples per symbol (black arrows), with Ts being the symbol period.
After sampling and AD conversion, downsampling is performed, discarding the samples crossed in red, maintaining
two samples for each transmitted symbol. In this way, system parameters, such as the transmitter modulator and the
receiver AD converters operation rates, remain unchanged. For RZ systems this scheme may require special care
during the clock recovery and is left for further study.
Cognitive Power Management scheme may be resumed in the following steps:
 IP routers switch operational rates of their Ethernet interfaces between 1 and 10 Gb/s according to the
traffic conditions through auto-negotiation with the line interface, basing the decision on internal buffer
size and historical traffic patterns.
 CPM line interface monitors the rate of its Ethernet interfaces, computes the optimal transmission rate and
adjusts the multiplexing scheme.
  When the sum of the traffic from all connected IP routers is such that the transmission rate switch at the
optical transmitter is triggered, the transmitter – receiver synchronization is performed.
Ts
100G
CPM- 1G/10G
Capable Identical symbols
IP GRouter 12.5G 50G
...

CPM-Capable 25G
Identical symbols
Line Interface 50G 25G
100G
CPM- 1G/10G Identical symbols
Capable 12.5G
IP GRouter
(a) Optical line interface (b) Transmission scheme
Fig.3. CPM architecture
 At the receiver, the downsampling pattern and the electronic CD compensation filter length are readjusted
according to the new transmission rate.
Fig. 4 depicts the CPM transmission profile for daily traffic of Fig. 1(a). As an example, under the conditions
described is Section 2 (i.e., link length = 2000 km, nm, ps/nm/km, modulation format: PM-
QPSK, ), this profile reduces the number of daily real multiplications associated with CD compensation by
40% (from to Tops).
Estimating the associated reduction in power consumption is a complex task affected by many factors, e.g., data
rate, technology, architecture, packaging, interconnect design, etc. However, power scaling should be reasonably
linear with respect to the number of operations per second. Also note that power consumption in CPM depends
heavily on the peak traffic.
100

75
Trafic [Gb/s]

50

25

12.5 Traffic profile

Transmission rate
0
08 12 16 20 00 04 08
Hour

Fig. 4. CPM for daily traffic fluctuations

4. Conclusions
We presented a scheme for efficient management of power consumption related to the CD compensation, based on
time variability of the internet traffic. CPM lowers transmission rate by repeating the transmitted symbols, so that
operational parameters of the electronic components remain unchanged. We showed that power saving may be
achieved if those fluctuations are exploited. A key feature of CPM is the IP router-transponder auto-negotiation for
transmission rate adjustment. This characteristic may be further explored in future cognitive systems.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Innovation Center, Ericsson Telecomunicações S.A., Brazil.
References
[1] P. Bower, I. Dedic: “High Speed Converters and DSP for 100G and Beyond”, J. Opt. Fiber Technol., vol. 17, num. 5, pp. 464-471, 2011.
[2] V. Rozental et al.: “Cognitive power management in 100G optical transponders," Transparent Optical Networks (ICTON), 2012 14th
International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1-4, 2-5 July 2012.
[3] Center of Study and Research in Network Technology and Operations – CEPTRO, Brazil. Available at: http://www.ptt.br/.
[4] S. Savory: Digital Filters for Coherent Optical Receivers, Optics Express vol. 16, pp. 804-817, 2008.
[5] R. Blahut, Fast Algorithms for Signal Processing. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
[6] J. Proakis and D. Manolakis, Digital signal processing: principles, algorithms, and applications, 3rd ed. Prentice Hall, 1996.