Segment routing based traffic engineering for energy efficient backbone networks

Energy consumption has become a limiting factor for deploying large-scale distributed infrastructures. This work¹ seeks to improve the energy efficiency of backbone networks by providing an intra-domain Software Defined Network (SDN) approach to selectively turn off a subset of links. We propose the STREETE framework (SegmenT Routing based Energy Efficient Traffic Engineering) that dynamically adapts the number of powered-on links to the traffic load. The core of the solution relies on SPRING, a novel protocol being standardized by IETF. It is also known under the name of Segment Routing. The algorithms have been implemented and evaluated using the OMNET++ simulator. Experimental results show that the consumption of 44% of links can be reduced while preserving good quality of service.