Robust energy-aware routing with redundancy elimination

Many studies in literature have shown that energy-aware routing (EAR) can significantly reduce energy consumption for backbone networks. Also, as an arising concern in networking research area, the protocol-independent tra c redundancy elimination (RE) technique helps to reduce (a.k.a compress) tra c load on backbone network. Motivation from a formulation perspective, we first present an extended model of the classical multi-commodity flow problem with compressible flows. Moreover, our model is robust with fluctuation of tra c demand and compression rate. In details, we allow any set of a predefined size of traffic flows to deviate simultaneously from their nominal volumes or compression rates. As an applicable example, we use this model to combine redundancy elimination and energy-aware routing to increase energy e ciency for a backbone network. Using this extra knowledge on the dynamics of the tra c pattern, we are able to significantly increase energy e ciency for the network. We formally define the problem and model it as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP). We then propose an e cient heuristic algorithm that is suitable for large networks. Simulation results with real tra c traces on Abilene, Geant and Germany50 networks show that our approach allows for 16 28% extra energy saving with respect to the classical EAR model.