Green IGP link weights for energy-efficiency and load-balancing in IP backbone networks

The energy consumption of backbone networks has become a primary concern for network operators and regulators due to the pervasive deployment of wired backbone networks to meet the requirements of bandwidth-hungry applications. While traditional optimization of IGP link weights has been used in IP based load-balancing operations, in this paper we introduce a novel link weight setting algorithm, the Green Load-balancing Algorithm (GLA), which is able to jointly optimize both energy efficiency and load-balancing in backbone networks. Such a scheme can be directly applied on top of existing link sleeping techniques in order to achieve substantially improved energy saving gains. The contribution is a practical solution that opens a new dimension of energy efficiency optimization, but without sacrificing traditional traffic engineering performance in plain IP routing environments. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed optimization scheme without losing generality, we applied it to a set of recently proposed but diverse algorithms for link sleeping operations in the literature. Evaluation results based on the European academic network topology, GÉANT, and its real traffic matrices show that GLA can achieve significantly improved energy efficiency compared to the original standalone algorithms, while also maintaining near-optimal load-balancing performance.