Greener networking in a network virtualization environment

Energy consumption of network operators can be minimized by the dynamic and smart relocation of networking resources. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of network virtualization to enable a smart energy aware network provisioning. The virtualization of networking resources leads to the problem of mapping virtual demands to physical resources, known as Virtual Network Embedding (VNE). Our proposal modifies and improves exact existing energy aware VNE proposals where the objective is to switch off as many network nodes and interfaces as possible by allocating the virtual demands to a consolidated subset of active physical networking equipment. As exact energy efficient VNE approaches are hard to solve for large network sizes and have an adverse effect in the number of successful embeddings, an heuristic approach to reconfigure the allocation of already embedded virtual networks, minimizing the energy consumption, is also proposed. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.