Energy management in communication networks: a journey through modelling and optimization glasses

TL;DR

This paper surveys energy management in communication networks, focusing on modeling and optimization approaches to reduce ICT energy footprint through network resource management and sleep modes.

Contribution

It provides a unified tutorial overview of existing optimization models in green networking, highlighting commonalities and differences across various solutions.

Findings

Identifies common modeling frameworks in green networking.

Classifies existing models based on their components and objectives.

Highlights gaps and future directions in energy-aware network modeling.

Abstract

The widespread proliferation of Internet and wireless applications has produced a significant increase of ICT energy footprint. As a response, in the last five years, significant efforts have been undertaken to include energy-awareness into network management. Several green networking frameworks have been proposed by carefully managing the network routing and the power state of network devices. Even though approaches proposed differ based on network technologies and sleep modes of nodes and interfaces, they all aim at tailoring the active network resources to the varying traffic needs in order to minimize energy consumption. From a modeling point of view, this has several commonalities with classical network design and routing problems, even if with different objectives and in a dynamic context. With most researchers focused on addressing the complex and crucial technological aspects of green networking schemes, there has been so far little attention on understanding the modeling similarities and differences of proposed solutions. This paper fills the gap surveying the literature with optimization modeling glasses, following a tutorial approach that guides through the different components of the models with a unified symbolism. A detailed classification of the previous work based on the modeling issues included is also proposed.