Disruption-Free Link Wake-Up Optimisation for Energy Aware Networks

Energy efficiency has become a major research topic in the Internet community as a result of unprecedented rise in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. One typical approach towards energy efficiency is to select a subset of IP routers or interfaces that will go to sleep mode during the off-peak period. However, on-the-fly network reconfiguration is generally deemed harmful especially to real time packets due to routing reconvergence. In this paper, we develop an efficient algorithm for achieving energy efficiency which is disruption free. The objective is to incrementally wake up sleeping links upon the detection of increased traffic demand. Unlike normal approaches of manipulating link weights or reverting to full topology in case of even minor network congestion and thereby sacrificing energy savings, our algorithm wakes up the minimum number of sleeping links to the network in order to handle this dynamicity. The performance of our algorithm was evaluated using the GEANT network topology and its traffic traces over a period of one week. According to our simulation results, up to almost 47% energy gains can be achieved without any obstruction to the network performance. Secondly, we show that the activation of a small number of sleeping links is still sufficient to cope with the observed traffic surge.