A Survey of Green Networking Research

Reduction of unnecessary energy consumption is becoming a major concern in wired networking, because of the potential economical benefits and of its expected environmental impact. These issues, usually referred to as "green networking", relate to embedding energy-awareness in the design, in the devices and in the protocols of networks. In this work, we first formulate a more precise definition of the "green" attribute. We furthermore identify a few paradigms that are the key enablers of energy-aware networking research. We then overview the current state of the art and provide a taxonomy of the relevant work, with a special focus on wired networking. At a high level, we identify four branches of green networking research that stem from different observations on the root causes of energy waste, namely (i) Adaptive Link Rate, (ii) Interface proxying, (iii) Energy-aware infrastructures and (iv) Energy-aware applications. In this work, we do not only explore specific proposals pertaining to each of the above branches, but also offer a perspective for research.Comment: Index Terms: Green Networking; Wired Networks; Adaptive Link Rate; Interface Proxying; Energy-aware Infrastructures; Energy-aware Applications. 18 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Energy and Spectrum Efficient Transmission Techniques Under QoS Constraints Toward Green Heterogeneous Networks

This paper proposes a joint energy efficiency (EE) and spectrum efficiency (SE) tradeoff analysis as a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) in the uplink of multi-user multi-carrier two-tier orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access heterogeneous networks subject to users' maximum transmission power and minimum rate constraints. The proposed MOP is modeled such that the network providers can dynamically tune the tradeoff parameters to switch between different communication scenarios with diverse design requirements. In order to find its Pareto optimal solution, the MOP is transformed, using a weighted sum method, into a single-objective optimization problem (SOP), which itself can further be transformed from a fractional form, by exploiting fractional programming, into a subtractive form. Since the formulated SOP is hard to solve due to the combinatorial channel allocation indicators, we reformulate the SOP into a better tractable problem by relaxing the combinatorial indicators using the idea of time-sharing. We then prove that this reformulated SOP is strictly quasi-concave with respect to the transmission power and the subcarrier allocation indicator. We then propose an iterative two-layer distributed framework to achieve an upper bound Pareto optimal solution of the original proposed MOP. The numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed two-layer framework achieving an upper bound Pareto optimal solution, which is very close to an optimal solution, with fast convergence, lower and acceptable polynomial complexity, and balanced EE-SE tradeoff

Traffic-Driven Energy Efficient Operational Mechanisms in Cellular Access Networks

Recent explosive growth in mobile data traffic is increasing energy consumption in cellular networks at an incredible rate. Moreover, as a direct result of the conventional static network provisioning approach, a significant amount of electrical energy is being wasted in the existing networks. Therefore, in recent time, the issue of designing energy efficient cellular networks has drawn significant attention, which is also the foremost motivation behind this research. The proposed research is particularly focused on the design of self-organizing type traffic-sensitive dynamic network reconfiguring mechanisms for energy efficiency in cellular systems. Under the proposed techniques, radio access networks (RANs) are adaptively reconfigured using less equipment leading to reduced energy utilization. Several energy efficient cellular network frameworks by employing inter-base station (BS) cooperation in RANs are proposed. Under these frameworks, based on the instantaneous traffic demand, BSs are dynamically switched between active and sleep modes by redistributing traffic among them and thus, energy savings is achieved. The focus is then extended to exploiting the availability of multiple cellular networks for extracting energy savings through inter-RAN cooperation. Mathematical models for both of these single-RAN and multi-RAN cooperation mechanisms are also formulated. An alternative energy saving technique using dynamic sectorization (DS) under which some of the sectors in the underutilized BSs are turned into sleep mode is also proposed. Algorithms for both the distributed and the centralized implementations are developed. Finally, a two-dimensional energy efficient network provisioning mechanism is proposed by jointly applying both the DS and the dynamic BS switching. Extensive simulations are carried out, which demonstrate the capability of the proposed mechanisms in substantially enhancing the energy efficiency of cellular networks