Robust Energy Management for Green and Survivable IP Networks

Despite the growing necessity to make Internet greener, it is worth pointing out that energy-aware strategies to minimize network energy consumption must not undermine the normal network operation. In particular, two very important issues that may limit the application of green networking techniques concern, respectively, network survivability, i.e. the network capability to react to device failures, and robustness to traffic variations. We propose novel modelling techniques to minimize the daily energy consumption of IP networks, while explicitly guaranteeing, in addition to typical QoS requirements, both network survivability and robustness to traffic variations. The impact of such limitations on final network consumption is exhaustively investigated. Daily traffic variations are modelled by dividing a single day into multiple time intervals (multi-period problem), and network consumption is reduced by putting to sleep idle line cards and chassis. To preserve network resiliency we consider two different protection schemes, i.e. dedicated and shared protection, according to which a backup path is assigned to each demand and a certain amount of spare capacity has to be available on each link. Robustness to traffic variations is provided by means of a specific modelling framework that allows to tune the conservatism degree of the solutions and to take into account load variations of different magnitude. Furthermore, we impose some inter-period constraints necessary to guarantee network stability and preserve the device lifetime. Both exact and heuristic methods are proposed. Experimentations carried out with realistic networks operated with flow-based routing protocols (i.e. MPLS) show that significant savings, up to 30%, can be achieved also when both survivability and robustness are fully guaranteed

Power Management Strategies for Wired Communication Networks.

With the exponential traffic growth and the rapid expansion of communication infrastructures worldwide, energy expenditure of the Internet has become a major concern in IT-reliant society. This energy problem has motivated the urgent demands of new strategies to reduce the consumption of telecommunication networks, with a particular focus on IP networks. In addition to the development of a new generation of energy-efficient network equipment, a significant body of research has concentrated on incorporating power/energy-awareness into network control and management, which aims at reducing the network power/energy consumption by either dynamically scaling speeds of each active network component to make it capable of adapting to its current load or putting to sleep the lightly loaded network elements and reconfiguring the network. However, the fundamental challenge of greening the Internet is to achieve a balance between the power/energy saving and the demands of quality-of-service (QoS) performance, which is an issue that has received less attention but is becoming a major problem in future green network designs. In this dissertation, we study how energy consumption can be reduced through different power/energy- and QoS-aware strategies for wired communication networks. To sufficiently reduce energy consumption while meeting the desire QoS requirements, we introduce several different schemes combing power management techniques with different scheduling strategies, which can be classified into experimental power management (EPM) and algorithmic power management (APM). In these proposed schemes, the power management techniques that we focus on are speed scaling and sleep mode. When the network processor is active, its speed and supply voltage can be decreased to reduce the energy consumption (speed scaling), while when the processor is idle, it can be put in a low power mode to save the energy consumption (sleep mode). The resulting problem is to determine how and when to adjust speeds for the processors, and/or to put a device into sleep mode. In this dissertation, we first discuss three families of dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS) based, QoS-aware EPM schemes, which aim to reduce the energy consumption in network equipment by using different packet scheduling strategies, while adhering to QoS requirements of supported applications. Then, we explore the problem of energy minimization under QoS constraints through a mathematical programming model, which is a DVFS-based, delay-aware APM scheme combing the speed scaling technique with the existing rate monotonic scheduling policy. Among these speed scaling based schemes, up to 26.76% dynamic power saving of the total power consumption can be achieved. In addition to speed scaling approaches, we further propose a sleep-based, traffic-aware EPM scheme, which is used to reduce power consumption by greening routing light load and putting the related network equipment into sleep mode according to twelve flow traffic density changes in 24-hour of an arbitrarily selected day. Meanwhile, a speed scaling technique without violating network QoS performance is also considered in this scheme when the traffic is rerouted. Applying this sleep-based strategy can lead to power savings of up to 62.58% of the total power consumption

Energy-efficient traffic engineering

The energy consumption in telecommunication networks is expected to grow considerably, especially in core networks. In this chapter, optimization of energy consumption is approached from two directions. In a first study, multilayer traffic engineering (MLTE) is used to assign energy-efficient paths and logical topology to IP traffic. The relation with traditional capacity optimization is explained, and the MLTE strategy is applied for daily traffic variations. A second study considers the core network below the IP layer, giving a detailed power consumption model. Optical bypass is evaluated as a technique to achieve considerable power savings over per-hop opticalelectronicoptical regeneration. Document type: Part of book or chapter of boo

Post-peak ICT: graceful degradation for communication networks in an energy constrained future

In recent years, rising energy prices and increasing environmental concerns have boosted research in the so called green ICT and green networking research tracks, aimed at improving the energy efficiency of communications while still offering maximal functionality. In this article we explore a future scenario in which low power networking is no longer optional, but instead becomes a necessity due to fluctuating energy availability. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, we argue why a so called post-peak future scenario, in which we can no longer rely on fossil fuels as our main resource for electricity production, is not unlikely, and what it might entail. Second, we explore the consequences of such a scenario for ICT: How well can current and future infrastructures cope with temporary energy limitations? As an illustration, we present a case study showing the impact of reduced energy availability on a wireless access network

An Energy-aware Routing Mechanism for Latency-sensitive Traffics

With the rapid development of Internet technology and enhanced QoS requirements, network energy consumption has attracted more and more attentions due to the overprovision of network resources. Generally, energy saving can be achieved by sacrificed some performance. However, many popular applications require real-time or soft real-time QoS performance for attracting potential users, and existing technologies can hardly obtain satisfying tradeoffs between energy consumption and performance. In this paper, a novel energy-aware routing mechanism is presented with aiming at reducing the network energy consumption and maintaining satisfying QoS performance for these latency-sensitive applications. The proposed routing mechanism applies stochastic service model to calculate the latency-guarantee for any given network links. Based on such a quantitative latencyguarantee, we further propose a technique to decide whether a link should be powered down and how long it should be kept in power saving mode. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism, and the results indicate that it can provide better QoS performance for those latency-sensitive traffics with improved energyefficiency