Energy-aware node and link reconfiguration for virtualized network environments

Energy consumption in information and communications technology (ICT) accounts for a large portion of the total energy consumed in industrial countries, which is rapidly increasing. Virtualized network environments (VNEs) have recently emerged as a solution in this technology to address the challenges of future Internet. VNEs also play a fundamental role toward virtualizing data centers. Consequently, it is essential to develop novel techniques for reducing the energy consumption of VNEs. In this paper, we discuss multiple energy-saving solutions that locally optimize the node and link energy consumption of VNEs during the off-peak period by reconfiguring the mapping of already allocated virtual nodes and links. The proposed reconfigurations enable the providers to adjust the level of the reconfiguration and accordingly control possible traffic disruptions. An integer linear program (ILP) is formulated for each solution. Because the defined ILPs are NPNP-hard, a novel heuristic algorithm is also proposed. The proposed energy-saving methods are evaluated over random VNE scenarios. The results confirm that the solutions save notable amounts of energy in physical nodes and links during the off-peak period.