A northbound interface for power management in next generation network devices

Recently, a number of approaches based on dynamic power management techniques have been proposed to reduce the energy consumption of telecommunication networks and devices. They are able to optimize the trade-off between network performance and energy requirements. It is possible to execute and extend these techniques to the whole network, by using local control policies together with energy-aware routing and traffic engineering. However, the lack of a standardized representation of the energy-aware capabilities of heterogeneous networking equipment makes their deployment confusing and impractical. To this aim, we have proposed a novel framework, the green abstraction layer (GAL), whose purpose is to define a multi-layered abstraction interface for the hardware and physical resources, where energy management actions are directly performed. Therefore, the GAL syntax can be exposed to the platform-independent logical representation commonly used in network control protocols. Given the internal architectural complexity and heterogeneity of many network devices, the GAL approach is based on a hierarchical decomposition, where each level provides an abstract and aggregated representation of internal components.