Energy-Efficient Link and Node Power Control for Avoidance of Congestion in Accordance with Traffic Load Fluctuations

With the increase in network traffic due to the increasing use of the Internet, the number of network appliances such as routers and links, as well as power consumption for those appliances, is increasing. Meanwhile, considering the demand for reduction in power consumption for networks, it is desired to halt network appliances that have little traffic. However, when a network appliance is halted, there is a possibility that traffic will concentrate at a specific network appliance that is operating, which may result in congestion. Furthermore, since there are variations in the amount of traffic on real networks, it is necessary to perform switching for booting and halting routers, links, etc. Therefore, control is needed such that appliances will be halted as much as possible while avoiding congestion in view of variations in the amount of traffic. Accordingly, in the research reported in this paper, we designed a method of controlling halting and booting of links and nodes in a situation where the amount of traffic varied, and we evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed control method through numerical experiments.