O-Gene: Towards an open green network control plane

Recent contributions on energy-aware management, aimed at improving the energy efficiency of network infrastructures are based on a combined use of two levers: power consumption optimization obtained by (wholly or partially) switching off a single network device and traffic engineering strategies (with related algorithms) that, given the traffic model on a daily time period, minimize the global energy consumption avoiding traffic congestion. Switches, routers and links of the actual Internet are often represented by simple power consumption models, based on just a few states (typically, on and off). Time for off-to-on switching is often ignored. We claim that complex large-scale network infrastructures need an energy-conscious control plane, which is able of quickly configuring the network by taking into account both energy efficiency goals and QoS constraints. In this paper we present a green extension to the GMPLS network control plane, that is able of minimizing the global power consumption under QoS constraints. Time for fully activating components that were initially in stand-by or off is considered as a QoS requirement.