Optimizing Link Sleeping Reconfigurations in ISP Networks with Off-Peak Time Failure Protection

Energy consumption in ISP backbone networks has been rapidly increasing with the advent of increasingly bandwidth-hungry applications. Network resource optimization through sleeping reconfiguration and rate adaptation has been proposed for reducing energy consumption when the traffic demands are at their low levels. It has been observed that many operational backbone networks exhibit regular diurnal traffic patterns, which offers the opportunity to apply simple time-driven link sleeping reconfigurations for energy-saving purposes. In this work, an efficient optimization scheme called Time-driven Link Sleeping (TLS) is proposed for practical energy management which produces an optimized combination of the reduced network topology and its unified off-peak configuration duration in daily operations. Such a scheme significantly eases the operational complexity at the ISP side for energy saving, but without resorting to complicated online network adaptations. The GÉANT network and its real traffic matrices were used to evaluate the proposed TLS scheme. Simulation results show that up to 28.3% energy savings can be achieved during off-peak operation without network performance deterioration. In addition, considering the potential risk of traffic congestion caused by unexpected network failures based on the reduced topology during off-peak time, we further propose a robust TLS scheme with Single Link Failure Protection (TLS-SLFP) which aims to achieve an optimized trade-off between network robustness and energy efficiency performance.