Network Energy Management

[Hesham ElBakoury <[e-mail]>]

There has been some discussions in IETF 114 about how to reduce the 
network energy consumption and carbon footprint. Most of the 
energy-aware routing and traffic engineering publications that I have 
seen rely on powering down network elements such as interfaces, line 
cards and routers to save power. The problems with this approach are: 1) 
to power up these elements when they are needed may take long time which 
may cause undesirable service disruption, and 2) network operators may 
not trust routing and traffic engineering software to power down and up 
these elements without operator intervention.

To address these problems we may do one of the following:

1- Do not power down any network element, and try some other way to 
reduce energy such as adjusting the cooling level based on network load.

2- Do not power down any network element, but put the element in low 
power idle state to consume least amount of power while it is not used 
to forward traffic.  In this state it is quicker to bring the element 
into fully operational state. This solution may require hardware support.

3- Use traffic analysis and modeling techniques perhaps with AI/ML 
algorithms to predict which elements to power down/up and when, in such 
a way to avoid service disruption.

4- Use renewable energy, store it in the router and return back to the 
energy source the energy that is not used so that someone else can use it.

5- If you have other approaches, please let us know.

In all these approaches we need to instrument the network to monitor its 
traffic loading and energy consumption.

Comments ?

Hesham