Energy-efficient overlay for data transfers in private networks

Enterprise networks have been built for decades, increasing in size and complexity mostly due to richer media and the rising traffic demands of applications. Although management and other techniques have been able to cope with network complexity, little attention has been paid to curb the energy consumption. We have proposed the High-level Energy-awaRe Model for bandwidth reservation in End-to-end networkS (HERMES), a framework that ensures energy-efficiency by using scheduling algorithms that rely on aggregation of bandwidth reservations, on/off mechanisms and usage predictions. In this paper, we present new functionalities of this framework and we show through simulation results that HERMES can be used as an overlay to save substantial amounts of energy in private networks.