Cherish every joule: Maximizing throughput with an eye on network-wide energy consumption

Conserving network-wide energy consumption is becoming an increasingly important concern for network operators. In this work, we study network-wide energy conservation problem which we hope will offer insights to both network operators and users. In the first part of this work, we study how to maximize throughput under a network-wide energy constraint. We formulate this problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP). We propose a novel piece-wise linear approximation to transform the nonlinear constraints into linear constraints. We prove that the solution developed under this approach is near-optimal with guaranteed performance bound. In the second part, we generalize the problem in the first part by exploring throughput and network-wide energy optimization via a multi-criteria optimization framework. We show that the weakly Pareto-optimal points in the solution can characterize an optimal throughput-energy curve. We offer some interesting properties of the optimal throughput-energy curve which are useful to both network operators and end users.