A Power Consumption Reduction Scheme in Hose-Model Networks with Bundled Links

Recently, attention has been paid to the energy consumption of telecommunication networks. However, the often over-provisioned wired network situation is still overlooked. In core networks, pairs of routers are typically connected by multiple physical cables that form one logical bundled link participating in the intra-domain routing protocol. To achieve energy consumption reduction in hose-model networks with bundled links, we propose a scheme to shut down unused cables. A similar approach has been presented in the literature for the pipe model where the exact traffic matrix is supposed to be known. However, it is difficult for operators to have an exact knowledge of the traffic matrix due to traffic uncertainty. They can nevertheless prevent traffic uncertainty by using hose model which specifies the upper bounds to the egress/ingress traffic from/to a node. We introduce a mixed integer linear problem formulation for an optimal solution and a more practical and near optimal heuristic algorithm for large network. Our performance evaluation results show that we achieve as much as 50% of power reduction compared to the shortest path routing. We achieve as well better results than the conventional maximum throughput formulation for the hose model.