Multipath routing for reducing network energy

Reducing energy consumption in networks has been recently receiving attention. Networks are typically designed to support peak loads. Energy saving is potentially achieved by appropriately provisioning network capacity, by shutting down unnecessary network elements while the capacity of remaining network elements still meets traffic demand. Traditionally, topology control techniques are employed to reduce the network to an appropriate size. In this paper, we propose techniques to construct an appropriate topology that takes the traffic demands into account. We also study how much multipath routing can contribute to energy saving compared to single/shortest path routing. We show that the proposed techniques reduce energy consumption by an additional 17% over previous schemes.