Leveraging MPLS Fast ReRoute Paths for Distributed Green Traffic Engineering

This paper introduces a new scheme called Green MPLS Fast ReRoute (GMFRR) for enabling energy aware traffic engineering. The scheme intelligently exploits backup label switched paths, originally used for failure protection, in order to achieve energy saving during the normal failure-free operation period. GMFRR works in an online and distributed fashion where each router periodically monitors its local traffic condition and cooperatively determines how to efficiently reroute traffic onto the backup paths in order to exploit opportunities for power saving through link sleeping in the primary paths. According to our performance evaluations based on the academic network GÉANT and its traffic matrices, GMFRR is able to achieve significant power saving gains, which are within 15% of the theoretical upper bound.