Equal Cost Multiple Path Energy-Aware Routing in Carrier-Ethernet Networks with Bundled Links

The reduction of operational expenditure has become a major concern for telecommunication operators and Internet service providers. In this paper, we propose an energy aware routing (EAR) in Carrier Ethernet networks operating with Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) protocol with equal cost multi-path (ECMP). Since traffic load has no influence on power consumption of Carrier Ethernet network elements, the conventional solution to reduce power consumption is to find the maximal set of network elements that can be turned off on so that the network performance is not deteriorated. To tackle this optimization problem, we propose an exact method based on Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation, called SPB energy-aware routing (SPB-EAR). Since SPB-EAR is proved to be NP-hard, we present two heuristics algorithm suitable for large-sized networks, called Green SPB (G-SPB) and Fast Greedy SPB (FG-SPB). In this work, we consider that a connection between two nodes is represented by bundled link consisting of multiple cables. Experimentations on four realistic network topologies show that G-SPB and FG-SPB can save almost as much power consumption as SPB-EAR.