Active Routing in Green Home Networks

This paper proposes the idea of a new class of routing protocols, named active routing, in which the routing decisions are not only related to the choice of the best path given a topology, but they also concerns topology modifications in order to reduce energy consumption. The scenario is a hybrid home network, where different technologies, mainly wireless, are available, like in the home network envisaged within the ICT OMEGA project. In order for the proposed class of routing protocol to work properly, the home network is controlled by a network manager which is capable of driving the interfaces of the available devices, in such a way that links can be switched on/off to decide the home network topology in such a way it is possible to minimize the energy consumption of the communication interface.