  Information-centric networking (ICN) facilitates content identification in
networks and offers parametric representation of content semantics. This work,
proposes an ICN/WDM network architecture that uses these features to offer
superior network utilization, in terms of performance and power consumption.
The architecture introduces an ICN publish/subscribe communication approach to
the wavelength layer, whereby, content is aggregated according to its
popularity rank into wavelength-size groups that can be published and
"subscribed to" by multiple nodes. Consequently, routing and wavelength
assignment (RWA) algorithms benefit from anycast to identify multiple sources
of aggregate content and allow optimization of the source selection of
light-paths. A power-aware algorithm, Maximum Degree of connectivity (MaxDeg),
has been developed with the objective of exploiting this flexibility to address
the trade-off between power consumption and network performance. The algorithm
is also applicable to IP architectures, albeit with less flexibility.
Evaluation results indicate the superiority of the proposed ICN architecture,
even when utilizing conventional routing methods, compared to its IP
counterpart. The results further highlight the performance improvement achieved
by the proposed algorithm, compared to conventional RWA methods such as
Shortest-path First Fit (SFF).
