Energy-aware traffic engineering with elastic demands and MMF bandwidth allocation

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a remarkable growth of the Internet energy consumption, which is expected to persist in the future at an even higher pace. At the same time the network access capacity of individual subscribers is rapidly reaching values high enough to move the traffic bottleneck from the access network to the core network in most scenarios. This will soon make the elastic nature of traffic an important aspect of network resource management and will require a redesign of the energy-aware traffic engineering techniques so far based on inelastic traffic demands. We propose a novel optimization approach to select a routing path for each elastic traffic demand and decide which routers and links to put to sleep so as to maximize a network utility measure depending on the traffic demand rates, while satisfying a constraint on the total energy consumption. Bandwidth is allocated to each elastic demand according to the Max-Min Fairness (MMF) paradigm, which approximates the resource allocation of the transport layer.