Elsevier

Computer Communications

Volume 50, 1 September 2014, Pages 130-141
Computer Communications

On IGP link weight optimization for joint energy efficiency and load balancing improvement

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2014.05.003Get rights and content

Abstract

The energy consumption of backbone networks has risen exponentially during the past decade with the advent of various bandwidth-hungry applications. To address this serious issue, network operators are keen to identify new energy-saving techniques to green their networks. Up to this point, the optimization of IGP link weights has only been used for load-balancing operations in IP-based networks. In this paper, we introduce a novel link weight setting algorithm, the Green Load-balancing Algorithm (GLA), which is able to jointly optimize both energy efficiency and load-balancing in backbone networks without any modification to the underlying network protocols. The distinct advantage of GLA is that it can be directly applied on top of existing link-sleeping based Energy-aware Traffic Engineering (ETE) schemes in order to achieve substantially improved energy saving gains, while at the same time maintain traditional traffic engineering objectives. In order to evaluate the performance of GLA without losing generality, we applied the scheme to a number of recently proposed but diverse ETE schemes based on link sleeping operations. Evaluation results based on the European academic network topology GÉANT and its real traffic matrices show that GLA is able to achieve significantly improved energy efficiency compared to the original standalone algorithms, while also achieving near-optimal load-balancing performance. In addition, we further consider end-to-end traffic delay requirements since the optimization of link weights for load-balancing and energy savings may introduce substantially increased traffic delay after link sleeping. In order to solve this issue, we modified the existing ETE schemes to improve their end-to-end traffic delay performance. The evaluation of the modified ETE schemes together with GLA shows that it is still possible to save a significant amount of energy while achieving substantial load-balancing within a given traffic delay constraint.

Introduction

Computer networks have been consuming an increasing amount of energy because of their greater pervasiveness due to the need to support new network applications such as video based services and cloud computing. Nowadays, network operators are keen to identify new efficient ways of greening their networks so as to reduce both their operational costs and environmental impact. By 2020, European Telecoms are expected to consume around 35.8 TW h, a rapid rise from the current 21.4 TW h consumed per year, if greener networks are not deployed [1]. More specifically, the share of backbone networks in the total network power consumption will increase from 10% to 40% by 2020 if no green actions are taken. This rapid change is mainly driven by the ever increasing popularity of bandwidth-hungry applications over the Internet. In order to tackle the rapid increase in the energy consumption of backbone networks, different Energy-aware Traffic Engineering (ETE) schemes have been proposed in the last few years [2], [3], [8], [9], [11], [12]. These schemes apply different sleep reconfiguration and transmission rate adaptation techniques at network devices to achieve enhanced energy efficiency. One typical strategy is to use only a subset of network devices for carrying customer traffic when the traffic volume is low during off-peak time. This allows other network devices to have the opportunity to save energy, e.g. through sleeping. As long as the reduced network capacity is sufficient for handling the traffic demand, energy can be saved without causing service deterioration to end users.

On the other hand, network operators traditionally employ traffic engineering (TE) schemes [4] for the sole purpose of load-balancing because this was their main concern in the past before the energy efficiency issue also became a concern. Traditionally, the ultimate objective of load-balancing is to reduce the Maximum Link Utilization (MLU) in the network through optimized distribution of traffic. This reduction in MLU allows the networks to offer better Quality-of-Service (QoS) assurance and also to efficiently handle unexpected traffic surges. However, conventional load-balancing and ETE are intuitively conflicting with each other in network configurations since load-balancing attempts to distribute the traffic as evenly as possible while ETE algorithms attempt to concentrate traffic on the smallest feasible subset of active devices (e.g. network links) in order to allow other elements to sleep. To intelligently resolve such a tussle, a new ETE scheme called Green Load-balancing Algorithm (GLA) is proposed in this paper. The novelty of such a scheme is that it jointly optimizes the load-balancing and energy efficiency in a holistic manner. GLA achieves such objectives by optimizing the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) link weights in order to maximize energy saving gains through link sleeping, while maintaining, or even further improving the load-balancing performance of the residual working topology. This is in salient contrast to the conventional single-objective IGP link weight setting schemes that optimize for load-balancing only and therefore do not efficiently provide opportunities for link sleeping operations. In summary, our contribution is a practical solution that opens a new dimension of energy efficiency optimization, but without sacrificing traditional traffic engineering performance in plain IP routing environments.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: the related work is described in detail in Section 2 and an illustrative example to highlight the concepts and reasoning of GLA is given in Section 3. In Section 4, the problem formulation of optimizing link weights for both load-balancing and energy efficiency is presented. A short description of the three ETE schemes that are used in this paper to evaluate the performance of GLA is also provided in Section 4. An in-depth description of the GLA mechanism is given in Section 5 and GLA is evaluated with the help of the Point-of-Presence representation of the European academic network GÉANT and its real traffic matrices in Section 6. GLA is shown to substantially improve both the load-balancing and energy efficiency of the three chosen existing ETE schemes. In Section 7, GLA is further customized for a specific ETE scheme and is shown to improve even more the performance of this ETE scheme. This shows that GLA can be regarded as a generic enough technique that can be further customized based on the specifics and particularities of the ETE schemes it is applied on. In Section 8, the maximum propagation delay of the different ETE schemes is evaluated. Since, as will be shown, this delay can be excessive as a result of their operations, the three existing ETE schemes are modified in Section 9 so that they can respect a constraint on the maximum propagation delay. The new delay-aware ETE schemes are evaluated against their original counterparts in Section 10. Finally, the paper is summarized and some directions for future work are provided in Section 11.

Section snippets

Related work

A number of strategies are currently being followed to reduce the energy consumption of backbone networks. The first strategy is the use of more energy-efficient hardware in network equipment. Energy efficiency of the hardware can be improved by employing lower power circuit design at the physical level [9], [10], [11] and using dynamic frequency and voltage scaling at the functional level [12], [13], [14]. Secondly, it is also possible to make use of greener networking protocols. For example,

An illustrative example of GLA

In order to illustrate the basic concept of GLA-based link weight optimization for both load-balancing and energy efficiency, we use the small example network topology in Fig. 1 with the indicated link capacities and IGP weight settings. The aim of such an example is to illustrate how IGP link weights can be manipulated in order to create opportunities for more links to sleep, but without affecting the load-balancing requirements. For simplicity and clarity, we use an “incomplete”

Problem formulation

The joint-optimization of load-balancing and energy efficiency in a network can be expressed with the following two objectives (see Table 1):minimizeUmaximizeEsubject to:j=1|N|fijsd-j=1|N|fjisd=tsds,d,i=s-tsds,d,i=d0s,d,is,dfij<α100×ciji,jwithα[0,100]

Eq. (1) represents the first objective of GLA which is the minimization of the Maximum Link Utilization (MLU) in the network in order to achieve load-balancing. For the GLA scenarios based on one traffic matrix, it refers to the MLU related

Scheme overview

Since it is well-known that computing the optimal link weights for basic load-balancing alone is already an NP-hard problem [35], here we propose a new scheme, Green Load-balancing Algorithm (GLA), which is based on meta-heuristics (evolutionary/genetic algorithms) to find the optimized IGP link weights which can solve the more complicated problem of the joint-optimization of load-balancing and energy efficiency in a backbone network.

More specifically, GLA is used to solve the problem of

Network scenario

We evaluate the performance of GLA on top of the three different ETE schemes, LF [21], MP [22] and TLS [7], [8], by using the operational network topology, GÉANT and its published traffic matrices [37]. GÉANT is a European academic network which has allowed researchers access to its network topology and traffic matrices. The published topology consists of 23 Points-of-Presence (PoPs) and 74 unidirectional links of varying bandwidth capacities which are described in Table 2 below. The total

Solution-enhancement heuristic

The performance of GLA for TLS can be improved further if GLA is further customized for TLS through the use a solution-enhancement heuristic (SH). This enhanced version of GLA is called Green Load-balancing Algorithm with solution-enhancement heuristic (GLA-SH). SH operates on the best solution in the population at the end of each iteration of GLA. The best solution is determined by a single aggregated objective function represented by the ratio of Maximum Link Utilization to energy efficiency

Packet delay performance of the existing ETE schemes

The end-to-end maximum packet delay (MPD) of operational networks has become increasingly important due the popularity of real-time applications such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and video streaming [39]. These applications normally require a bounded MPD in order to provide end-users with good Quality-of-Experience (QoE). The three ETE schemes, described in Section 4.2: LF, MP and TLS, are oblivious to packet delay and therefore, the packet delay may substantially increase when links are put to

Improvement to current ETE schemes for maximum packet delay constraint

In the previous section, it was indicated that the MPD performance of the three plain ETE schemes can vary substantially with the three sets of link weights. The current ETE schemes do not have a deterministic way of ensuring that a bounded MPD performance is maintained. Therefore, there is no guarantee that the MPD performance will remain within the tolerance limits of network operators. In light of this observation, it is desired to further extend the current ETE schemes so as to guarantee a

Performance evaluation of ETE schemes with maximum packet delay constraint

We evaluate the three new MPD-aware ETE schemes, namely LF-D, MP-D and TLS-D, by using the same network scenario as described in Section 6.1 and compare the load-balancing and energy-savings performance when the Default and GLA link weights are used. The IGP-WO link weights were not used during the evaluation because they give an MPD value which is very high. Specifically, the newly introduced extra delay due to the optimization of the link weights for load-balancing only is substantially

Summary

In this paper, we proposed the Green Load-balancing Algorithm (GLA), which intelligently optimizes IGP link weights in IP backbone networks in order to improve both the load-balancing and energy efficiency of existing ETE schemes. GLA uses a customized multi-objective genetic algorithm to identify the optimized solutions. In addition, two new custom mutation and crossover operators have been designed to improve the performance of the genetic algorithm by enabling the solution space to be

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