Optimising data placement and traffic routing for energy saving in backbone networks

The energy consumption of network elements has become a big concern due to the exponential traffic growth and the rapid expansion of communication infrastructures. To deal with this problem, we propose a new approach called Backbone network Energy Saving based on Traffic engineering (BEST), which reduces the power consumption of network elements at the backbone level through jointly optimising data placement and traffic routing. Based on analysis on traffic characteristics, BEST firstly optimises the placement of data services such that the pairwise traffic demands can be better coordinated with the pairwise network costs, in order to minimise the traffic burden imposed on the network elements. Then, BEST optimises the routing of traffic flows and tries to find the minimum-power network subset that must remain active to fulfill the traffic requirements. Efficient heuristics are given by BEST to find an admissible solution when the problem size is very large. The simulation results illustrate the efficacy and efficiency of BEST in energy conservation on backbone networks.