Energy-aware traffic engineering in IP networks using non-dominated sorting genetic II algorithm

Abstract

Wide spreading of computer networks along with increasing traffic demand throughout the Internet caused a dramatic increase in energy consumption by networking devices and Internet infrastructure. Energy-aware traffic engineering is a promising approach towards green networking to achieve a trade-off between energy saving and network utilisation in backbone networks. In this paper, we propose to use non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) for energy-aware intra-domain traffic engineering. This algorithm tries to make a trade-off between maximum link utilisation (MLU) and energy reservation. For each pair of network topology and traffic matrix, NSGA-II computes the optimal set of links to put to sleep so that the resulting topology would be able to carry the traffic demand. We developed a simulator to evaluate the performance of our mechanism. The results of comprehensive evaluations show that our energy-aware TE approach increases the network performance in terms of energy conservation by 50% at the cost of slight increase in maximum link utilisation.