Cost-aware optimization models for communication networks with renewable energy sources

We address a traffic engineering problem where, given a communication network and a set of origin-destination demands, we have to select a single-path routing for each demand and decide which communication interfaces to switch off or run at partial load so as to minimize the total operational costs. We account for the presence of renewable energy plants at some nodes of the network, as well as feed-in-tariffs, rebates and variable energy prices. We also consider the related problem of deciding where renewable energy sources (photovoltaic modules in this case) have to be installed so as to maximize the profit, while respecting a maximum investment budget constraint. We propose mixed integer optimization models for these two problems and we report results for two different network topologies.