Patent ID: 8392737

Claim:
A system for controlling power consumption of a network, the system comprising: at least one terminal to receive a plurality of requests to route data from a plurality of data sources to a plurality of data sinks, wherein the data sources and the data sinks are connected to each other through a plurality of network nodes forming the network; and a network configuration unit including: a selection module configured to select a configuration of the network nodes that allows the network to have a lowest overall power consumption of the network among a plurality of configurations of the network, wherein the selection is made based on the data routing requests from the data sources, and configured to select a network path for transmitting a network flow, wherein the selecting comprises: characterizing a problem of selecting the network path as multi-commodity flow problem, constraining the multi-commodity flow problem with constraints including that deactivated links in the network have no traffic and that the network flow is transmitted on the selected path and is not allowed to be split to flow through another network path, and determining a solution to the multi-commodity flow problem that satisfies the constraints; and an output module configured to output a plurality of instruction signals to the network nodes to perform the network configuration.