Minimizing Energy Consumption with a CloneAnt-Based Routing Algorithm for Communication Network

Energy saving in the ICT equipments has been an urgent problem recently. Although the average utilization of network is less than 40% most of the time, its energy consumption is almost the same as peak-hour´s. In order to minimize energy consumption and improve resource utilization, we aggregate traffic into a network subset and turn off the remaining network elements. The problem is the classical capacitated multi-commodity flow problem (CMCF), which is proved to be NP-complete. In this paper, we propose a new CloneAnt-based Ant Colony Optimization Routing Algorithm (CACO-RA), and improve the classic CMCF model by aggregating traffic demands. Our algorithm transmits each demand pair through multiple paths, and aggregates flows which includes the same destination, then we get a network subset with the minimal consumption. Simulation results show that our algorithm has better performance in power consumption, computation time and reject rate.