Centralized energy-efficient routing control for greener internet

The issue of energy saving for the Internet has gained attention since new applications are increasing tremendously, along with their energy consumption. In this paper we propose Centralized Energy-efficient Routing Control (CERC) strategy in the Internet. For CERC strategy, the energy management controller smartly sleeps/awakes network links (i.e., IP router interfaces) based on the dynamic traffic without changing link metrics of current link-state routing protocol (i.e., OSPF protocol) in the Internet. This facilitates green network OAM (Operation, Administration and Management). Performance study shows that, in a test network, CERC achieves a good tradeoff between energy efficiency and load balancing.