Routers’ Energy Consumption Reduction With Load Saturation Awareness And Traffic Steering

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector sets its net-zero emission goal to be achieved by 2050 to fight the climate change because it will constitute as highly as 20% of the global energy consumption in the near future. How to build a greener Internet is of significant part to achieve such a goal. Build on top of the sleeping and standby philosophy, the paper proposes mechanisms on achieving load saturation aware routing path selection while there are multiple equal-cost paths available. The traffic is steered to the path with highest Load Saturation Ratio (LSR), such that a router’s interface or a router itself might have the opportunity to be switched off or put in sleeping mode to save the overall energy consumption. The paper discusses the mechanisms to implement and improve the likelihood to achieve such routers’ energy consumption reduction.