Control system for reducing energy consumption in backbone computer network

Network optimization concerned with operational traffic management in existing data networks is typically oriented towards either maximizing throughput in congested networks while providing for adequate transmission quality, or towards balancing the traffic so as to maintain possibly large free capacity for carrying additional (new) traffic. Nowadays, the reduction of power consumption is a new key aspect in the development of modern wired networks. Power management capabilities allow modulating the energy consumption of devices that form a network by putting them into standby state, or by decreasing their performance in case of low incoming traffic volume. This paper presents a framework for backbone network management, which leads to the minimization of the energy used by this network. The policy for dynamic power management of the whole network through energy-aware routing, traffic engineering, and network equipment activity control is introduced and discussed. The concept of the system is to achieve the desired trade-off between total power consumption and the network performance according to the current load, incoming traffic, and user requirements. The effectiveness of our framework is illustrated by means of a numerical study. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.