Energy-Efficient Dimensioning with Traffic Engineering for Municipal Mesh Access Networks

We target energy efficiency of municipal access networks. A municipal access network typically provides coverage for city-wide area, and is characterized by diverse and dynamic traffic profiles. Most existing approaches to energy savings adapt network state to traffic variation. However, these approaches fail to capture the potential of energy savings by exploiting the traffic that has already existed in the network. We study network dimensioning for municipal mesh access networks to save energy by rearranging existing traffic and adjusting link rate. The problem of energy-efficient network dimensioning is formulated using mixed integer linear programming. We also propose an efficient heuristic algorithm that consists of both traffic engineering and link-rate adaptation. Numerical experimental results show that our scheme is more effective than link-rate adaptation in saving energy, and achieves a good balance between energy efficiency and resource efficiency.