WDM Environmental Assessment and its Application

Abstract:
Due to massively increasing ICT bandwidths and long lifetime with always-on use mode, the environmental impact of wavelength-domain multiplexing equipment is dominated by carbon emissions caused by use-phase electricity consumption. These and other impacts are evaluated by lifecycle assessment. This includes the identification of the components areas that need to be tackled following the focus on energy efficiency. As an example, we analyze two approaches for WDM systems of a given capacity, “disaggregated” systems and conventional modular multi-slot systems, and show that environmentally, the latter have slight advantages.