ECO-friendly distributed routing protocol for reducing network energy consumption

The growth of Internet traffic has led to an increase in energy consumption by network equipment such as routers and switches. Consequently, energy consumption is becoming a key environmental, social, political and cost issue. Focusing on energy consumption by Internet Service Provider networks, the energy bottleneck is routers. Thus, it is imperative for us to reduce the energy consumption of routers. In this paper, we propose a new ECO-friendly distributed routing protocol (ECO-RP) based on OSPF. In our proposal, an ECO-RP entity periodically checks the amount of traffic forwarded by the ECO-RP entity. Moreover, an ECO-RP entity floods information on the amount of traffic to other entities such as the OSPF Link State Advertisement. This allows each ECO-RP entity to obtain information on traffic in the network, and to dynamically change OSPF link weights based on the information. For example, when the amount of overall network traffic is small, the entity changes link weights so that the traffic can be routed only through a subset of routers, and unneeded routers can shift into sleep mode. Several simulation studies, which assume two ECO-RP enabled networks, are conducted. The result shows that the proposed protocol is able to reduce energy consumption by about 18.5% at maximum without network congestion.