Evaluation of power saving in an MPLS/IP network hosting a virtual router layer of a single service provider

As a consequence of the rapid growth of Internet, the power consumption of the network equipment has increased significantly. This trend will continue in the next years and some strategies to contain the power used in the IP network are needed. Among the green networking strategies the virtualization class and in particular the deployment of virtual routers can lead to a high energy saving. In this paper we propose an heuristic for the migration of virtual routers among physical devices in order to turn off as many nodes as possible and save power according to the compliance with network node and link capacity constraints. We show that the 28% of nodes may be turn off when traffic percentage reduction of 80% occurs.