A survey on green routing protocols using sleep-scheduling in wired networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2016.10.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Over recent years, green communications have been proposed as an emerging strategy to reduce the Carbon footprint produced by the networking sector. It consists in using different software and hardware techniques allowing to minimize the energy consumption of network components. A significant amount of energy saving can be obtained by switching redundant or unused network components to inactive mode, referred to as sleep-scheduling. To achieve this, the routing algorithm should aggregate traffic flows over a subset of network routers and their links, allowing other components to be switched off. The objective of this paper is to present a holistic survey on existing sleep-scheduling based green routing protocols in wired networks. First, we propose a classification of main properties of sleep-scheduling based green routing protocols and use the proposed classification to categorize and describe the existing literature. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive comparison of existing green routing protocols and determine the main characteristics, assets and issues of each proposal. In addition, we identify and classify the main metrics for evaluating and comparing the efficiency of green routing protocols using sleep-scheduling. Finally, we identify the open issues and key guidelines towards an ideal green routing protocol for wired networks.

Introduction

Over recent years, green communications have been emerged as an important area of concern for communication research and industrial communities. It relates to any hardware or software technique allowing to reduce the energy consumption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. The relevance of this trend turns back to its impact on environmental pollution and economic cost. Indeed, recent studies estimated that the ICT is responsible for up to 10% of the global CO2 emissions, while its contribution is doubled from the year 2006 to the year 2011 (Beloglazov et al., 2011, Webb, 2008, Global action plan report, 2007). An important amount of ICT energy is reported to be consumed in network components, reaching between 30–37% of Green Houses Gases (GHG) produced by the ICT sector (Webb, 2008, Gartner, 2007). Consequently, an important effort is required to reduce the energy consumption of networking environments.

Nowadays, network resources including bandwidth, processing power and memory are oversized to handle high traffic loads, with only 30–40% of utilization in low traffic periods (Nedevschi et al., 2008, Guichard et al., 2005, Adelin, 2010, Gupta and Singh, 2003). Consequently, an important energy saving can be obtained by switching off extra components during low traffic conditions (Bianzino et al., 2012, Eyupoglu and Aydin, 2015). To achieve this, the routing algorithm should aggregate traffic flows over a subset of network routers and their links, allowing other components to be switched off. In this paper, the technique of switching off extra components is designated as sleep-scheduling, while the routing algorithm using this technique to provide the network with green features is referred to as sleep-scheduling based green routing protocol. Due to the significant amount of energy conserved through sleep-scheduling, this paper mainly focuses on sleep-scheduling based green routing protocols.

Since the green communications' tentative has been launched, a number of sleep-scheduling based green routing protocols has been proposed by the research community (Cianfrani, 2010, Cianfrani et al., 2012, Amaldi et al., 2011, Bianzino et al., 2012, Cuomo et al., 2011, Shen et al., 2012). However, to the best of our knowledge, a holistic survey on works overviewing recent advances in sleep-scheduling based green routing in wired networks has not existed so far. To address the aforementioned shortage in current literature, we present a comprehensive survey on sleep-scheduling based green routing protocols. Moreover, we propose a classification on green properties highlighting different characteristics of existing proposals. Based on this classification, we identify the main advantages and issues of existing green routing proposals and compare them qualitatively based on their main features. Due to the relevant impact of quantitative evaluation and comparison towards an ideal solution, we also identify and classify the main numerical metrics for evaluating and comparing the efficiency of sleep-scheduling based green routing protocols. Finally, we raise a set of open issues and propose key guidelines towards an ideal solution.

The reminder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides background and related topics. Section 3 reports main related surveys relevant to the present study. Section 4 presents our proposed classification of main green properties. Section 5 surveys general green routing protocols using sleep-scheduling. Section 6 describes the main existing MPLS-based and SDN-based proposals. In addition, it presents existing protocols considering inter-domain routing aspects to optimize the network performance and the energy gain of sleep-scheduling decisions. Section 7 presents a classification on the identified metrics for evaluating and comparing the efficiency of green routing protocols using sleep-scheduling. Section 8 presents a qualitative comparison of surveyed literature and outlines some open issues and guidelines towards an optimal green solution. Finally, Section 9 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Background

In this section, we determine the scope and main terminologies of the paper, providing a clear definition of the employed key terms and some highly related topics.

Related surveys

A number of comprehensive surveys on routing protocols and Internet traffic engineering has been already provided in the literature. Mainly, routing protocols in wired and wireless networks are summarized in Boukerche et al. (2011), Goyal and Tripathy (2012), Patil and Biradar (2012), Tang and Liu (2011), Levis et al. (2009). In Awduche et al., (2011) the authors described the general issues and principles of Internet traffic engineering. A holistic overview of QoS/constraint-based routing and

Green properties classification

In this section, we classify relevant properties of existing green routing protocols using sleep-scheduling. Four classes of green properties have been identified, namely type of sleep-scheduled component, decision structure, network traffic awareness and QoS awareness. In the following, we describe each identified category of green properties and outline its importance to green routing. Table 1 summarizes the green properties classification.

Green routing protocols using sleep-scheduling

As mentioned, the sleep-scheduling approaches can switch off some underutilized devices in order to more energy conservation. In this regard, finding a minimum connected subgraph of network topology is an objective that should satisfy the network performance metrics. Obviously, there exists a trade off between energy conservation and network performance. Therefore, the optimal version of sleep-scheduling approaches is modeled by Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and the complexity of it is NP-

Other green routing protocols using sleep-scheduling

In the previous section, we surveyed the IP-based and inter-domain unaware green routing protocols using sleep-scheduling. In order to provide a holistic survey, this section overviews the existing inter-domain aware and MPLS-based proposals. In addition, some recent works using the new Software Defined Networking (SDN) concept are presented. These subjects are respectively presented in following subsections.

Green evaluation metrics

An important step towards an ideal sleep-scheduling based green routing protocol is to be able to evaluate and compare the efficiency of existing green solutions. This latter can lead to identify the pros and cons of each approach and to propose an optimal solution taking the advantages of existing proposals while avoiding their shortcomings. In the following, we identify and classify the main metrics for evaluating and comparing the efficiency of green routing protocols using sleep-scheduling.

Discussion and open issues

In this section, we compare the strengths and weaknesses of existing sleep-scheduling based green routing protocols, their open issues and the future directions towards a convergent green solution.

Conclusion

In this paper, we raised the importance of green communications in today and emerging networking area and surveyed the existing proposals in wired networks. We focused mainly on sleep-scheduling green approaches since a dominant source of energy waste is consumed during inactivity periods. The identified key characteristics of sleep-scheduling based green routing protocols were classified into four green properties, including the type of sleep-scheduled component, decision structure, network

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Center for International Scientific Studies and Collaboration (CISSC) and French Embassy in Iran.

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