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While telecommunication networks have historically been dominated by a circuit-switched paradigm, the last decades have seen a clear trend towards packet-switched networks. In this paper we evaluate how both paradigms (which have also been referred to as optical bypass and non-bypass, respectively) perform in optical backbone networks from a power consumption point of view, and whether the general agreement of circuit switching being more power-efficient holds. We consider artificially generated topologies of various sizes, mesh degrees and – not yet previously explored in this context – transport linerates. We cross-validate our findings with a number of realistic topologies.

Our results show that circuit switching is preferable when the average node-to-node demands are higher than half the transport linerates. However, packet switching can become preferable when the traffic demands are lower than …