Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 J Ambient Intell Human Comput DOI 10.1007/s12652-017-0527-z ORIGINAL RESEARCH Energy‑efcient anycast scheduling and resource allocation in optical grids Saja Al Mamoori 1  · Darshil Rami 1  · Arunita Jaekel 1   Received: 19 February 2017 / Accepted: 17 April 2017 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017 approach for anycast and unicast routing models. Our simu- lation results demonstrate that the proposed approach can lead to signifcant reductions in energy consumption, com- pared to traditional routing schemes. Keywords Optical-grid networks · Energy-aware routing · Sliding window scheduled trafc · Demand holding times · Anycasting · Unicasting 1 Introduction Grid computing refers to high performance computing resource sharing using optical backbone networks to sup- port data-intensive applications. Grid computing provides a solution to better utilize these resources, for applications where the physical location of the resource is not impor- tant. Grids provide a form of distributed computing (Tafani et al. 2012) whereby a super virtual computer is composed of many networked loosely coupled computers, acting together to perform large tasks (Mishra et al. 2017). For the grid computing the basic requirement is high speed with low delay time. Optical communications technology with wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks fulflls the requirements for optical grid computing as it can carry large amount of data with reliability. Recent studies have shown that the energy consumption can become the bot- tleneck for the high speed data communication (Shen and Tucker 2009; Gupta and Singh 2003; Kukreja et al. 2017) in today’s networks. Efcient routing schemes and resource allocation both in optical and electrical domain can be used to help mitigate this problem (Orgerie et al. 2014). A transparent IP-over-WDM network can be utilized to allow trafc to optically bypass the electronic components, e.g. IP routers and switches, which typically consumes more Abstract In recent years, optical grid networks has been used as an ideal infrastructure to support high-performance computing environment, data intensive applications and interconnection of data centers. Due to rapid increase in the high-bandwidth applications, the power consumption of communications equipment for such networks has been increasing steadily over the past decade. Therefore, energy efcient routing schemes and trafc models can be devel- oped to reduce the energy consumption. In many applica- tions it is possible to select the destination node from a set of possible destinations, which have the required comput- ing/storage resources. This is known as anycasting com- pared to unicasting where there is only one destination for each communication. In this paper we adopt the slid- ing scheduled trafc model, where setup and tear down times may vary within larger window frame. We propose a novel problem that exploits knowledge of demand holding times using anycasting model. We show how the fexibil- ity of anycast routing can lead to additional energy saving. The problem was formulated as an integer linear program to optimally schedule demands (in time) and route them in order to minimize overall network energy consump- tion. The problem of energy consumption is addressed by switching of idle network components in low utiliza- tion periods. We analyze the performance of the proposed * Arunita Jaekel arunita@uwindsor.ca Saja Al Mamoori almamo@uwindsor.ca Darshil Rami rami@uwindsor.ca 1 School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada