Joint Use of Adaptive Link Rate and Virtual Router Migration Techniques to Reduce the Power Consumption in Telecommunication Networks

The design of an energy efficient IP network is one of the most important challenge that researchers have begun to address in the last decades. A promising resource consolidation technique to improve the energy efficiency of Internet is based on the virtual router migration: when traffic decreases virtual routers are moved and consolidated in fewer nodes of the underlying physical network in order to turn off empty physical nodes. In this paper we propose the extension of an heuristic previously defined. The main change consists in the possibility of turning off physical nodes hosting more than one virtual router with the consequence to increase the number of candidate physical nodes to be turned off. Further we show whether the virtual router migration is also effectiveness in the case in which the physical nodes are equipped with line cards implementing the Adaptive Link Rate (ALR) technique and whose power consumption is traffic dependent. We show how the energy efficiency of the virtual router migration technique decreases as both the traffic reduction and the base power consumption of the line cards decrease