Facing the traffic explosion in metro transport networks with energy-sustainable architectures

The continuous growth of traffic volumes is making the consumed energy, in telecommunication networks, a critical issue. In this context, the implementation of new content distribution solutions will speed up this traffic increase. In particular, these solutions will significantly impact the traffic profile in metro networks. The current centralized traffic scenario will move toward a scenario in which the traffic exchanges would be distributed among all the nodes of the metro network. In this work, starting from a real traffic scenario, we estimate a possible traffic evolution, and we design the metro networks, according to different architectures, using integer linear programming formulations. The aim was to understand which architecture can better face the considered traffic evolution. The comparison is performed considering the energy consumption, the network setup and management, and the quality of service ensured by the architectures.