User-Network Cooperation-Based Sleep Scheduling for Communication Networks

The redundant design and dynamic nature of traffic raise an energy inefficiency issue in communication networks. We exploit the selfishness of both users and the network to schedule cooperatively the idle links and nodes into sleep to save energy. We first formulate the sleep scheduling problem from a perspective of routing, and then propose a greedy algorithm to solve the problem. To reduce the complexity of centralized computation, we further propose a user-network cooperation-based mechanism, where the network publishes a proportionally weighted cost-sharing rule related to energy consumption, while the users selfishly choose their routes with the least cost accordingly. The proposed cooperation mechanism attracts users to aggregate their traffic on fewer links and nodes. The network then simply puts the idle links and nodes into sleep. Selfish routing behaviors are modeled by an α-approximate routing game, where the α factor is adopted to consider the energy consumption, packet losses, and delay during re-routing. We prove the equilibrium existence, convergence, and convergence speed of the best responses, and evaluate the lower bound performance in terms of price of anarchy with further improvement by an advertisement method. Distributed algorithms based on the best responses are also developed to implement the cooperative mechanism. Simulation results over network instants from SNDlib show that our game-based algorithms outperform the greedy and heuristic centralized algorithms in saving energy.