A Hop-by-Hop Routing Mechanism for Green Internet

In this paper we study energy conservation in the Internet. We observe that different traffic volumes on a link can result in different energy consumption; this is mainly due to such technologies as trunking (IEEE 802.1AX), adaptive link rates, etc. We design a green Internet routing scheme, where the routing can lead traffic in a way that is green. We differ from previous studies where they switch network components, such as line cards and routers, into sleep mode. We do not prune the Internet topology. We first develop a power model, and validate it using real commercial routers. Instead of developing a centralized optimization algorithm, which requires additional protocols such as MPLS to materialize in the Internet, we choose a hop-by-hop approach. It is thus much easier to integrate our scheme into the current Internet. We progressively develop three algorithms, which are loop-free, substantially reduce energy consumption, and jointly consider green and QoS requirements such as path stretch. We further analyze the power saving ratio, the routing dynamics, and the relationship between hop-by-hop green routing and QoS requirements. We comprehensively evaluate our algorithms through simulations on synthetic, measured, and real topologies, with synthetic and real traffic traces. We show that the power saving in the line cards can be as much as 50 percent.