On IGP link weight optimization for joint energy efficiency and load balancing improvement

The energy consumption of backbone networks has risen exponentially during the past decade with the advent of various bandwidthhungry applications. To address this serious issue, network operators are keen to identify new energy-saving techniques to green their networks. Up to this point, the optimization of IGP link weights has only been used for load-balancing operations in IP-based networks. In this paper, we introduce a novel link weight setting algorithm, the Green Load-balancing Algorithm (GLA), which is able to jointly optimize both energy efficiency and load-balancing in backbone networks without any modification to the underlying network protocols. The distinct advantage of GLA is that it can be directly applied on top of existing link-sleeping based Energy-aware Traffic Engineering (ETE) schemes in order to achieve substantially improved energy saving gains, while at the same time maintain traditional traffic engineering objectives. In order to evaluate the performance of GLA without losing generality, we applied the scheme to a number of recently proposed but diverse ETE schemes based on link sleeping operations. Evaluation results based on the European academic network topology GÉANT and its real traffic matrices show that GLA is able to achieve significantly improved energy efficiency compared to the original standalone algorithms, while also achieving near-optimal load-balancing performance. In addition, we further consider end-to-end traffic delay requirements since the optimization of link weights for load-balancing and energy savings may introduce substantially increased traffic delay after link sleeping. In order to solve this issue, we modified the existing ETE schemes to improve their end-to-end traffic delay performance. The evaluation of the modified ETE schemes together with GLA shows that it is still possible to save a significant amount of energy while achieving substantial load-balancing within a given traffic delay constraint.