Network Power Management: models and heuristic approaches

The paper describes and compares different approaches that can be used to design Network Power Management methods, with the aim of reducing the power consumption of telecommunication networks. The approaches are based on the solution of optimization problems that have, in general, a Mixed Integer NonLinear Programming (MINLP) formulation. Given that the problems are NP-hard, exact methods for finding optimal solutions can be used only for scenarios of limited size. In this framework, the paper proposes a heuristic for finding a suboptimal solution of the Power Aware Routing and Network Design (PARND) problem, which is one of the more general design problems in Network Power Management. The simulation study highlights the capability of the proposed heuristic to obtain solutions near the optimum and to outperform the other approaches in terms of energy savings, while satisfying the constraints of the traffic demands.