Orchestration of Energy Efficiency Functionalities for a Sustainable Network Management

The energy demand for operating Information and Communication Technologies is growing, implying in high operational costs and consequent carbon emissions. Both in datacenters and in telecom infrastructures, the networks represent a significant amount of energy spending. This implies in an increased demand for energy efficiency, and several functionalities to save energy are being proposed. However, there is no proposal on how to coordinate or combine such energy efficiency functionalities in the same network, or choosing the best one for a given scenario. There is neither a way to do this using business directives, telling, for instance, the period of the day to apply such functionalities or the operational conditions (e.g. If the network usage is low). In this regard, we propose a method able to orchestrate different energy efficiency functionalities considering the possible combinations and conflicts among them, as well as the best option for a given workload and network characteristics, such as topology and power profiles of devices. The business policies are refined down to the network level in order to bring high-level directives into the operation. Our method operation is validated with an example which achieves near 50% of savings for the given scenario by combining two different energy efficiency functionalities.