Optimal Energy-Aware Traffic Engineering Via Bender Algorithm

The growing and incessant energy consumption has already become a global concern, and currently more than forty countries are involved in research and programs in order to create mechanisms to save it. This work deals with the Energy-aware Traffic Engineering problem applied to the backbone of an IP network, presenting an approach to select routers and circuits to be switched off in time periods where network traffic is low. The approach is to focus on the optimization formulation, rather than on heuristic methods as usually observed in the literature. The associated linear optimization program, although frequently very large, can be broken by decomposition techniques into several low size optimization problems thus bringing the problem to the realm of practical feasibility.

Keywords:

traffic engineering , decomposition , benders algorithm , green networks , optimization