An energy efficient algorithm based on multi-topology routing in IP networks

Energy saving in the Internet has become important since the massive new applications are increasing tremendously, along with their energy consumption. In this paper we propose an energy efficient algorithm based on multi-topology routing. Since traffic flow dynamically changed in actual IP network scenarios, the proposed algorithm has to adapt the network energy consumption to daily traffic scenarios. The proposed algorithm is a three-phases algorithm: first, one day is divided into multiple time periods according to the daily traffic flow; second, in each time period, a corresponding energy efficient sub-topology is obtained by utilizing neighboring region search to configure link weights and switch off low loaded links; last, to improve network performance (such as packet loss rate) during energy efficient sub-topology changes in different time periods, an IP fast rerouting strategy is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has a better performance in energy efficiency than current energy efficient algorithm, and improve the network performance during time period changes.