GreenNet: Energy Management for Network Infrastructure

GreenTE: Power Aware Traffic Engineering

Problem Statement: Present-day networks are designed and operated to carry most traffic in the most reliable way without considerations of energy efficiency. A network usually builds many redundant links and aggressively over-provisions link bandwidth to accommodate potential link failures and traffic bursts.  This increases network reliability but also greatly reduces network's efficiency.

Idea: When there are multiple source-destination pairs and the traffic volume on each path is low, one can move traffic to a fewer number of paths so that the other paths do not carry any traffic for an extended period of time. 

Challenges: Network-level solutions require network-wide coordination of routers which, poses following challenges:

1. How to manipulate routing paths to make as many idle links as possible to maximize the power consumption?
2. How to achieve power conservation without significantly affecting network performance and reliability?

GreenTE is a power-aware traffic engineering mechanism that reduces network power consumption while still maintaining network performance at desired levels.