Minimization of network power consumption with redundancy elimination

Recently, energy-aware routing (EAR) has gained an increasing popularity in the networking research community. The idea is that traffic demands are redirected over a subset of the network links, allowing other links to sleep to save energy. In this paper, we propose GreenRE – a new EAR model with the support of data redundancy elimination (RE). This technique, enabled within routers, can virtually increase the capacity of network links. Based on real experiments on Orange Labs platform, we show that performing RE increases the energy consumption for routers. Therefore, it is important to determine which routers should enable RE and which links to put into sleep mode so that the power consumption of the network is minimized. We model the problem as Mixed Integer Linear Program and propose greedy heuristic algorithms for large networks. Simulations on several network topologies show that the GreenRE model can gain further 37% of energy savings compared to the classical EAR model.