ESOL: Energy saving in the Internet based on Occurrence of Links in routing paths

After the big Internet growing of the past decade, in the current decade a considerable effort is spent to reduce the Internet energy consumption. Actual Internet topologies have space to power off some links and devices in order to reduce energy consumed in off-peak periods still guaranteeing connectivity among terminals. In this paper we propose a methodology to identify less used links in the network in order to have the capability to switch off these network interfaces for energy saving purposes. We describe four different algorithms able to identify this set of links and we show the tradeoff between complexity, and the consequent execution time, and efficiency in powering off a great number of links. We find that, by using our solutions, it is possible to switch off a big percentage of links still keeping the network load under suitable thresholds and still guaranteeing topological characteristics of the resulting network topology.

I. Introduction

In the past decades a big effort has been dedicated to improve the Internet infrastructure by adding hardware and software systems that constitute essential components in its operation. Physical transmission lines along with routers constitute the skeleton if this infrastructure and they should provide network connectivity and reliability with satisfactory traffic support. However, in these years, its is emerging that on one side the power consumption of the Internet is about 0.4% of electricity consumption in broadband-enabled countries [1] and on the other side the Internet network topology has grown without a specific design thus giving rise to redundancies and resource wasting.