A Hierarchical Approach to Reduce Power Consumption in Core and Edge Networks: A Metric-Based Proposal

The authors present a metric-based hierarchical approach to reduce power consumption in core and edge networks. The proposal considers both unicast and the multicast cases. For unicast, the metric used is consumed-power to available-bandwidth and for multicast the metric is consumed-power to available-replication-capacity. With unicast, the metric is used to determine a low-power path between sources and destinations. The source and destination entities could be attached to Autonomous Systems (ASes) or to routing areas within the Autonomous System. Determining a low-power path within an Autonomous System provides a unique challenge as the topology of the constituent areas may not be known. To that end, we propose the use of a selective leak technique for disclosing low-power paths. Additionally, the proposed method can also be used to determine disjoint or redundant paths for load-balancing or fault tolerance. With multicast, the metric serves the twin purpose of finding low-power multicast paths as well as multicast replication points. Once low-power paths in either the unicast or the multicast cases are identified, then currently available traffic engineering techniques could be used to route the data packets.