The Internet as an indispensable communication system in our society has its share in energy consumption. The underlying network infrastructure, however, lacks effective energy management solutions. Not only does the energy consumption cost financially and environmentally, it also has becoming a limiting factor in system performance. Today's networks are aggressively over-provisioned in design and load-balanced in operation for maximum performance resulting in routers and links consuming close to peak energy even when highly underutilized. This project exploits routing path redundancy and low link utilization to design smart routing schemes that allow links to sleep when the network traffic load is low, and wake them up to serve the traffic when the load is high, thus reducing energy consumption while preserving network performance. To achieve this, novel algorithms and protocols for power-aware network routing, traffic engineering, and topology in Internet Service Providers will be designed and evaluated. An energy-efficient network infrastructure will lead to a greener Internet and enable ISPs to reduce energy consumptions while still providing QoS at desired levels. In addition, ISPs will be able to deploy network infrastructure in energy-constrained environments, such as post-disaster recovery and under-developed areas. The tools and techniques developed in this project will provide the research community with a platform and direction for research in network energy management.
