Virtual router migration and infrastructure sleeping for energy management of IP over WDM networks

Due to the rapid development of the Internet, the energy consumption of network equipment has increased significantly. It has a considerable impact on the environment, responsible for between 2-4% of all CO₂ emissions. As a consequence, much research has been done to reduce the energy consumption of networks whilst maintaining the quality of service. In this paper, a new energy-saving architecture for a backbone IP over WDM network is proposed. A key constraint of our architecture is to maintain the logical IP topology whilst saving energy by infrastructure sleeping and virtual router migration. Using the new architecture, the energy consumption saving is up to 24% in a 6 node-8 link test network and 20% in NSFNET comprising 14 nodes and 21 links. The architecture also includes a new genetic algorithm for solving the virtual router migration problem.