Signalling cost-aware routing for green networks

Abstract

Owing to the environmental impact and potential economic benefits, there is an urgent request for green techniques to reduce energy consumption in telecommunication networks. However, green approaches impose signalling overhead on the network. While most research works in the literature focus on minimisation of energy consumption in green networks, the signalling overhead has largely been unexplored. In this work, the authors tackle the trade-off between energy efficiency and signalling overhead in green routing by formulating an optimisation problem as an integer linear programme (ILP). Their ILP problem minimises signalling overhead with a constraint on the total power consumption of the network. Moreover, their problem introduces the multipath routing feature and takes the flow table sizes of the forwarding devices into account. They prove that the proposed green routing problem is nondeterministic polynomial (NP)-hard and thus propose a polynomial-time heuristic algorithm in addition to analysing its time complexity. They evaluate the performance of the heuristic algorithm by comparing its results with those generated by ILP.