No Traffic to Cry: Traffic-Oblivious Link Deactivation for Green Traffic Engineering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ilsen, Max, Otten, Daniel, Aschenbruck, Nils, Chimani, Markus
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Ilsen, Max
Otten, Daniel
Aschenbruck, Nils
Chimani, Markus
author_facet Ilsen, Max
Otten, Daniel
Aschenbruck, Nils
Chimani, Markus
contents As internet traffic grows, the underlying infrastructure consumes increasing amounts of energy. During off-peak hours, large parts of the networks remain underutilized, presenting significant potential for energy savings. Existing Green Traffic Engineering approaches attempt to leverage this potential by switching off those parts of the networks that are not required for the routing of specific traffic matrices. When traffic changes, the approaches need to adapt rapidly, which is hard to achieve given the complexity of the problem. We take a fundamentally different approach: instead of considering a specific traffic matrix, we rely on a traffic-oblivious routing scheme. We discuss the NP-hard problem of activating as few connections as possible while still guaranteeing that any down-scaled traffic matrix $\varrho\cdot T$ can be routed, where $\varrho \in (0,1)$ and $T$ is any traffic matrix routable in the original network. We present a $\max(\frac{1}{\varrho\cdotλ_{\text{min}}},2)$-approximation algorithm for this problem, with $λ_{\text{min}}$ denoting the minimum number of connections between any two connected routers. Additionally, we propose two post-processing heuristics to further improve solution quality. Our evaluation shows that we can quickly generate near-optimal solutions. By design, our method avoids the need for frequent reconfigurations and offers a promising direction to achieve practical energy savings in backbone networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_13087
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle No Traffic to Cry: Traffic-Oblivious Link Deactivation for Green Traffic Engineering
Ilsen, Max
Otten, Daniel
Aschenbruck, Nils
Chimani, Markus
Networking and Internet Architecture
68M10 (Primary) 05C21, 68W25 (Secondary)
C.2.1; G.2.2; F.2.2
As internet traffic grows, the underlying infrastructure consumes increasing amounts of energy. During off-peak hours, large parts of the networks remain underutilized, presenting significant potential for energy savings. Existing Green Traffic Engineering approaches attempt to leverage this potential by switching off those parts of the networks that are not required for the routing of specific traffic matrices. When traffic changes, the approaches need to adapt rapidly, which is hard to achieve given the complexity of the problem. We take a fundamentally different approach: instead of considering a specific traffic matrix, we rely on a traffic-oblivious routing scheme. We discuss the NP-hard problem of activating as few connections as possible while still guaranteeing that any down-scaled traffic matrix $\varrho\cdot T$ can be routed, where $\varrho \in (0,1)$ and $T$ is any traffic matrix routable in the original network. We present a $\max(\frac{1}{\varrho\cdotλ_{\text{min}}},2)$-approximation algorithm for this problem, with $λ_{\text{min}}$ denoting the minimum number of connections between any two connected routers. Additionally, we propose two post-processing heuristics to further improve solution quality. Our evaluation shows that we can quickly generate near-optimal solutions. By design, our method avoids the need for frequent reconfigurations and offers a promising direction to achieve practical energy savings in backbone networks.
title No Traffic to Cry: Traffic-Oblivious Link Deactivation for Green Traffic Engineering
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
68M10 (Primary) 05C21, 68W25 (Secondary)
C.2.1; G.2.2; F.2.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13087