Network pruning for energy saving in the Internet

Many scientific works propose methods of reducing the amount of energy consumed by the Internet. Although the structure of the Internet was not developed with specific attention to energy consumption, there are various components on which it is possible to act. In our work, we analyze the possibility of affecting the topology of the network. We propose a heuristic called Energy Saving based on TOPology control (ESTOP), which identifies poorly used router line cards by leveraging certain topological properties of the graph modeling an Internet Service Provider (ISP). By acting on these line cards - for example, by putting them into sleep mode - we prune the Internet topology and achieve significant energy savings while preserving the primary topological characteristics of the pruned network. Although ESTOP is traffic-unaware, we assess its behavior under real traffic loads, demonstrating that its performance is comparable to the more complex traffic-aware solutions proposed in the literature. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.