Green Link Weights for Disruption-Free Energy-Aware Traffic Engineering

Energy-aware traffic engineering (ETE) has been gaining increasing research attentions due to the cost reduction benefits that it can offer to network operators and for environmental reasons. While numerous approaches exist which attempt to provide energy reduction benefits by intelligently manipulating network devices and their configurations, most of them suffer from one fundamental shortcoming: however, minor adaptations to a given IP network topology configuration all lead to temporal service disruptions incurred by routing reconvergence, which makes these schemes less appealing to network operators. The more frequently the IP topology reconfigurations take place in order to optimize the network performance against dynamic traffic demands, the more frequently service disruptions will occur to end users. Motivated by the essential requirement for network operators to enable seamless service assurance, we put forward a framework for disruption-free ETE, which leverages on selective link sleeping and wake-up operations in a disruption-free manner. The framework allows for maximizing the opportunities for disruption-free reconfigurations based on intelligent IGP link weight settings, assisted by a dynamic scheme that optimizes the reconfigurations in response to changing traffic conditions. As our simulation-based evaluation show, the framework is capable of achieving significant energy saving gains while at the same time ensuring robustness in terms of disruption avoidance and resilience to congestion.