Cost-Effective Routing for a Greener Internet

Energy costs for data centers are a significant part of the overall expenses for their operation. With a reduction of these and associated costs, huge savings can be achieved. This paper describes a way to reduce the energy costs for data centers. The general idea behind our solution is very simple. Instead of routing the information required for any service interaction to and from the data center with the best latency performance or least utilization we rather propose that instead the one with the current cheapest energy costs should be used. We consider implications of our method to user performance and latency efficiency. Thereafter, we present methods such as mobile IPv6 and traffic tunneling which can be used to implement our general idea and discuss potential problems and benefits. The approaches described in this paper can all be integrated into the IP protocol and require therefore no modifications of the network topology, the used hardware or used protocols.