Routing on demand: Toward the energy-aware traffic engineering with OSPF

Energy consumption has already become a major challenge to the current Internet. Most researches aim at lowering energy consumption under certain fixed performance constraints. Since trade-offs exist between network performance and energy saving, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may desire to achieve different Traffic Engineering (TE) goals corresponding to changeable requirements. The major contributions of this paper are twofold: 1) we present an OSPF-based routing mechanism, Routing On Demand (ROD), that considers both performance and energy saving, and 2) we theoretically prove that a set of link weights always exists for each trade-off variant of the TE objective, under which solutions (i.e., routes) derived from ROD can be converted into shortest paths and realized through OSPF. Extensive evaluation results show that ROD can achieve various trade-offs between energy saving and performance in terms of Maximum Link Utilization, while maintaining better packet delay than that of the energy-agnostic TE.