Energy efficient online routing of flows with additive constraints

A number of studies report that ICT sectors are responsible for up to 10% of the worldwide power consumption and that a substantial share of such amount is due to the Internet infrastructure. To accommodate the traffic in the peak hours, Internet Service Providers (ISP) have overprovisioned their networks, with the result that most of the links and devices are under-utilized most of the time. Thus, under-utilized links and devices may be put in a sleep state in order to save power and that might be achieved by properly routing traffic flows. In this paper, we address the design of a joint admission control and routing scheme aiming at maximizing the number of admitted flow requests while minimizing the number of nodes and links that need to stay active. We assume an online routing paradigm, where flow requests are processed one-by-one, with no knowledge of future flow requests. Each flow request has requirements in terms of bandwidth and m additive measures (e.g., delay, jitter). We develop a new routing algorithm, E2-MCRA, which searches for a feasible path for a given flow request that requires the least number of nodes and links to be turned on. The basic concepts of E2-MCRA are look-ahead, the depth-first search approach and a path length definition as a function of the available bandwidth, the additive QoS constraints and the current status (on/off) of the nodes and links along the path. Finally, we present the results of the simulation studies we conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.