Enabling backbone networks to sleep

Today, backbone networks of telecom operators deploy a large number of devices and links. This is mainly due to both redundancy purposes for network service reliability and resource overdimensioning for maintaining quality of service during rush hours. Unfortunately, current network devices do not have power management primitives, and have constant energy consumption independent of their actual workloads. Starting from these considerations, we propose a viable approach to introduce and support standby modes in backbone network devices. This approach can be effectively used to almost halve the energy requirements of the whole telecom core network. Our main idea consists of periodically reconfiguring nodes and links to meet incoming traffic volumes and operational constraints of real-world networks, such as reliability, stability, quality of service, and reconvergence times. To this purpose, the approach we propose directly exploits the main features of both backbone device architectures and the network protocol stack.