Link sleeping optimization for green virtual network infrastructures

Power consumption in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is 10% of total energy consumed in industrial countries. According to the latest measurements, this amount is increasing rapidly in recent years. In the literature, a variety of new schemes have been proposed to save energy in operational communication networks. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization algorithm for network virtualization environment, by sleeping reconfiguration on the maximum number of physical links during off-peak hours, while still guaranteeing the connectivity and off-peak bandwidth availability for supporting parallel virtual networks over the top. Simulation results based on the GÉANT network topology show our novel algorithm is able to put notable number of physical links to sleep during off-peak hours while still satisfying the bandwidth demands requested by ongoing traffic sessions in the virtual networks.