Abstract-According to several studies, the power consumption of the Internet accounts for up to 10% of the worldwide energy consumption, and several initiatives are being put into place to reduce the power consumption of the ICT sector in general. To this goal, we propose a novel approach to switch off network nodes and links while still guaranteeing full connectivity and maximum link utilization. After showing that the problem falls in the class of capacitated multi-commodity flow problems, and therefore it is NP-complete, we propose some heuristic algorithms to solve it. Simulation results in a realistic scenario show that it is possible to reduce the number of links and nodes currently used by up to 30% and 50% respectively during off-peak hours, while offering the same service quality.
In a closely related work REF , the authors considered the problem of switching off network nodes and links while still ensuring full connectivity and maximum link utilization for backbone networks.
Reducing Power Consumption in Backbone Networks
2009 IEEE International Conference on Communications
2009 IEEE International Conference on Communications
Computer Science