Innovative Techniques for Power Consumption Saving in Telecommunication Networks

The increase in energy cost and the need to reduce the global greenhouse gas emission to protect our environment have stimulated the investigation of new innovative techniques for the energy consumption reduction in telecommunication networks. Some studies show that ICT is today responsible for a fraction of the world energy consumption of about 4%, and this percentage is expected to double in the next decade. ICT is expected to play a major active role in the reduction of the worldwide energy requirements, through the optimization of energy consumption. The purpose of this special issue is to study and evaluate the impact and potential exploitation of energy-aware innovative techniques for wired and wireless networks. The special issue consists of seven papers. The first three papers focus on the definition and evaluation of techniques, based on device clock frequency reduction and turning off of links and nodes, for the power consumption saving in wired networks. The next three papers introduce and evaluate management schemes and technological solutions for reducing the power consumption in wireless networks. Finally, the last paper investigates the use of optical technologies in reducing the power consumption of switching nodes. Brief summaries of the accepted articles are listed below. " Design of a traffic-aware governor for green routers " by A. Lombardo et al. focuses on routers that achieve energy saving by applying the frequency scaling approach. The authors propose an analytical model to support designers in choosing the main configuration parameters of the Router Governor in order to meet Quality of Service requirements while maximizing energy saving gain. A case study based on the open NetFPGA Reference Router is considered to show how the proposed model can be easily applied to a real case scenario. " Evaluation of power saving and feasibility study of migrations solutions in a virtual router network " by V. Eramo et al. evaluates how the migration of virtual routers can lead to an energy saving. The mechanism consists in migrating virtual routers in fewer physical nodes when the traffic decreases allowing for a power consumption saving. After formulating the problem of minimizing the power consumption as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming, a heuristic is proposed to evaluate the power saving in real network and traffic scenarios. The authors also perform a feasibility study by means of an experimental testbed to evaluate the migration time of a routing plane based on QUAGGA routing software. …