Power-Aware Routing and Network Design with Bundled Links: Solutions and Analysis

The paper deeply analyzes a novel network-wide power management problem, called Power-Aware Routing and Network Design with Bundled Links (PARND-BL), which is able to take into account both the relationship between the power consumption and the traffic throughput of the nodes and to power off both the chassis and even the single Physical Interface Card (PIC) composing each link. The solutions of the PARND-BL model have been analyzed by taking into account different aspects associated with the actual applicability in real network scenarios: (i) the time for obtaining the solution, (ii) the deployed network topology and the resulting topology provided by the solution, (iii) the power behavior of the network elements, (iv) the traffic load, (v) the QoS requirement, and (vi) the number of paths to route each traffic demand. Among the most interesting and novel results, our analysis shows that the strategy of minimizing the number of powered-on network elements through the traffic consolidation does not always produce power savings, and the solution of this kind of problems, in some cases, can lead to spliting a single traffic demand into a high number of paths.