Introducing energy-awareness in Traffic Engineering for Future Networks

One of the main challenges in the Future Internet era will be the increase of QoS-demanding applications that need to be supported. Unavoidably, this will lead to increased traffic that has to be served by the deployed networks. Moreover, the energy consumption and the configuration/management complexity will be significantly increased, too. Current network infrastructures and their associated management systems face problems in keeping up with such stringent requirements. Therefore, it is essential to reconsider the design and the management of the Future Networks. An important goal in this direction is to achieve the best ratio of performance to energy consumption and at the same time assure manageability. This paper presents a general theoretical problem formulation for Energy-Aware Traffic Engineering and a distributed Traffic Engineering scheme (ETE), inspired by the previous formulation, that provides load balancing and energy-awareness in accordance with the operator's needs. Results from trace-driven simulations confirm the capability of ETE to meeting the needs of Future Networks.