Understanding the basic principles implied in green traffic routing

The aim of green traffic routing is to reduce the extra energy cost in a network while still satisfying the traffic demand. The extra energy cost can be found from the line card, a device used to switch the traffic of the links. We study the mechanism of green traffic routing and find out basic principles behind it: first, traffic should be routed along paths with small hops; second, the ratio of the power consumption of line cards to the traffic amount though the link should be as small as possible. Based on these principles, we suggest that the line card manufacturing should be more flexible and various, which can also produce some line cards with small capacity and small power to adapt for the goal of green networking. Besides, we propose that the network can dynamically configure all the different line cards in need rather than only make a sleeping of pre-positioned line cards without changing their installation any more.