2011 Volume E94.B Issue 4 Pages 894-903
The Internet is an extremely convenient network and has become one of the key infrastructures for daily life. However, it suffers from three serious problems; its structure does not suit traffic centralization, its power consumption is rapidly increasing, and its round-trip time (RTT) and delay jitter are large. This paper proposes an extremely energy efficient layer-3 network architecture for the future Internet. It combines the Service Cloud with the Cloud Router and application servers, with the Optical Aggregation Network realized by optical circuit switches, wavelength-converters, and wavelength-multiplexers/demultiplexers. User IP packets are aggregated and transferred through the Optical Aggregation Network to Cloud transparently. The proposed network scheme realizes a network structure well suited to traffic centralization, reduces the power consumption to 1/20-1/30 compared to the existing Internet, reduces the RTT and delay jitter due to its simplicity, and offers easy migration from the existing Internet.