• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.76-87
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• 2014

Today the energy consumption of ICT networks is about 10% of the worldwide power consumption and is predicted to increase remarkably in the near future. For this reason, this paper studies energy saving strategies assuring the network-level QoS. In the strategies, the energy consumption of NIC(network interface card) on both endpoint of links decreases by selecting links and making them sleep when the total traffic volume of the IP network is lower than a threshold. In this paper, we propose a heuristic routing algorithm based on so-called delegating/delegated routers, and evaluate its characteristics using computer simulation considering network-level QoS. The selection of sleep links is determined in terms of the number of traffic paths (called min_used path) or the amount of traffics(called min_used traffic) through those kinks. To our experiment, the min_used traffic method shows a little better energy saving but the increased path length compared to the min_used path method. Those two methods have better energy saving characteristics than the random method. This paper confirms that the delegating/delegated router-based routing algorithm results in energy saving effects and sustains network-level QoS in IP networks.