Exploiting Segment Routing and SDN Features for Green Traffic Engineering

Energy efficiency for network devices becomes an important topic, as they consume a significantly amount of energy. Various techniques have been proposed to address energy-aware traffic engineering (TE), including Segment Routing (SR) and Software-defined Networking (SDN), which provide lower operational complexity and higher flexibility. However, existing approaches have not exploited some evolving SR and SDN features for efficient TE, e.g., path computation, sub-50 msec protection, and local/global segments. Consequently, those approaches result in higher complexity or extra overhead. This paper provides a holistic view of green TE using evolving SDN and SR-specific features without adding much additional computational tasks, and also considers SR segment processing overhead for energy efficiency. The proposed approach can simplify green TE by reusing SR features and improve energy efficiency and robustness.