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