Safe Routing in Energy-aware IP networks

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions represents one of the major concerns worldwide. In telecommunications, the research community and the industry are developing various solutions to decrease the energy consumption of infrastructures. In this paper, we focus on the energy efficiency of IP networks and, in particular, on energy-aware routing as a good complement to power management mechanisms inside routers. We present a safe energy-aware routing solution where the network controller leverages knowledge about device behaviors for power management to further increase energy savings. As energy saving mechanisms can impact network reliability, decisions are taken to avoid any disruption. First, we propose a mathematical model for the associated optimization problem, and then, we develop a hybrid Benders decomposition and Column generation algorithm to solve it. Finally, we present a performance evaluation on a real backbone network with two possible implementations of the solution.