Exposing energy-aware capabilities in next generation network devices

Dynamic power management techniques have been proposed in a number of recent approaches to reduce the energy consumption of telecommunication networks and devices. These techniques aimed at finding an optimal trade off between network performance and energy requirements. Control policies using energy-aware routing and traffic engineering can be used in order to extend these techniques to the whole network. However, the deployment of the energy-aware capabilities of heterogeneous networking is still unsystematic and impractical, as a standardized representation is still missing. To overcome such an issue, we introduce a novel framework, the Green Abstraction Layer (GAL), whose goal is to define a multi-layered abstraction interface for the hardware and physical resources. Within the GAL, energy management actions are directly performed. The GAL can be thus exposed to the platform-independent logical representation commonly used in network control protocols. Given the internal architectural complexity and heterogeneity of many network devices, the GAL approach is based on a hierarchical decomposition, where each level provides an abstract and aggregated representation of internal components. The general GAL architecture is currently under consideration for standardization in ETSI.