Lifetime awareness in backbone networks with sleep modes

We investigate the problem of managing the lifetime of links in IP backbone networks exploiting a sleep mode (SM) state. In particular, the SM duration tends to increase the lifetime, while the frequency of power state transitions tends to decrease it. After optimally formulating the problem of limiting the impact on the link lifetime when SMs are applied, we propose an online heuristic, called AFA, to practically solve it. Our solution performs SMs decisions at each time slot, without requiring the knowledge of future traffic (which may be an unrealistic assumption). We test the performance of AFA on a realistic case study, by comparing it against two algorithms energy-aware. Results show that AFA outperforms the other algorithms in terms of lifetime performance, while allowing devices to be put in SMs.