Dynamic link sleeping reconfigurations for green traffic engineering

The high volume of energy consumption has become a great concern to the Internet community because of high energy waste on redundant network devices. One promising scheme for energy savings is to reconfigure network elements to sleep mode when traffic demand is low. However, due to the nature of today's traditional IP routing protocols, network reconfiguration is generally deemed to be harmful because of routing table reconvergence. To make these sleeping network elements, such as links, robust to traffic disruption, we propose a novel online scheme called designate to sleep algorithm that aims to remove network links without causing traffic disruption during energy-saving periods. Considering the nature of diurnal traffic, there could be traffic surge in the network because of reduced network capacity. We therefore propose a complementary scheme called dynamic wake-up algorithm that intelligently wakes up minimum number of sleeping links needed to control such dynamicity. This is contrary to the normal paradigm of either reverting to full topology and sacrificing energy savings or employing on-the-fly link weight manipulation. Using the real topologies of GEANT and Abilene networks respectively, we show that the proposed schemes can save a substantial amount of energy without affecting network performance