Identifying and using energy-critical paths

The power consumption of the Internet and datacenter networks is already significant, and threatens to shortly hit the power delivery limits while the hardware is trying to sustain ever-increasing traffic requirements. Existing energy-reduction approaches in this domain advocate recomputing network configuration with each substantial change in demand. Unfortunately, computing the minimum network subset is computationally hard and does not scale. Thus, the network is forced to operate with diminished performance during the recomputation periods. In this paper, we propose REsPoNse, a framework which overcomes the optimality-scalability trade-off. The insight in REsPoNse is to identify a few energy-critical paths off-line, install them into network elements, and use a simple online element to redirect the traffic in a way that enables large parts of the network to enter a low-power state. We evaluate REsPoNse with real network data and demonstrate that it achieves the same energy savings as the existing approaches, with marginal impact on network scalability and application performance.