In recent years, the energy crisis is gaining increasing concern. It has been seen that Telecom networks also consume a largest amount of energy because more network equipments are added annually. In IP-over-WDM networks, network elements consumed energy not only at IP layers but also at WDM layers. At IP layer, the largest part of energy is consumed by Routers while on WDM layer, optical cross-connects (OXCs) consumed large energy. Generally in telecom networks, the network elements like the

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... routers are usually kept powered on, each time without their proper utilization. So we have proposed an approach to save energy by shutting down line cards and chassis of routers when traffic load is low. In our approach Genetic Algorithm has been used to ensure that the cost of energy used by the IP routers and optical cross-connects is reduce and our attention is on minimizing the network elements reconfiguration, for minimizing traffic interruption .