A northbound interface for power management in next generation network devices

• Published in: IEEE communications magazine 2014-01, Vol.52 (1), p.149-157
• Main Authors: Bolla, Raffaele, Szemethy, Tivadar, Bruschi, Roberto, Davoli, Franco, Donadio, Pasquale, Fialho, Leonardo, Collier, Martin, Lombardo, Alfio, Reforgiato, Diego, Riccobene, Vincenzo
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: Energy consumption; Energy management; Performance evaluation; Power demand; Power system management; Process control; Telecommunication network management; Telecommunication services; Traffic control
• ISSN: 0163-6804; 1558-1896
• DOI: 10.1109/MCOM.2014.6710077

Recently, a number of approaches based on dynamic power management techniques have been proposed to reduce the energy consumption of telecommunication networks and devices. They are able to optimize the trade-off between network performance and energy requirements. It is possible to execute and extend these techniques to the whole network, by using local control policies together with energy-aware routing and traffic engineering. However, the lack of a standardized representation of the energy-aware capabilities of heterogeneous networking equipment makes their deployment confusing and impractical. To this aim, we have proposed a novel framework, the green abstraction layer (GAL), whose purpose is to define a multi-layered abstraction interface for the hardware and physical resources, where energy management actions are directly performed. Therefore, the GAL syntax can be exposed to the platform-independent logical representation commonly used in network control protocols. Given the internal architectural complexity and heterogeneity of many network devices, the GAL approach is based on a hierarchical decomposition, where each level provides an abstract and aggregated representation of internal components.