Robust Redundancy Elimination for Energy-Aware Routing

Many studies have shown that energy-aware routing (EAR) can significantly reduce energy consumption of a backbone network. Redundancy Elimination (RE) techniques provide a complementary approach to reduce the amount of traffic in the network. In particular, the GreenRE model combines both techniques, offering potentially significant energy savings. We propose a concept for respecting uncertain rates of redundant traffic within the GreenRE model, closing the gap between theoretical modeling and drawn-from life data. To model redundancy rate uncertainty, the robust optimization approach of Bertsimas and Sim (2004) is adapted and the problem is formally defined as mixed integer linear program. An exemplary evaluation of this concept with real-life traffic traces and estimated fluctuations of data redundancy shows that this closer-to-reality model potentially offers significant energy savings in comparison to GreenRE and EAR.