RLE-MRC: Robustness and Low-Energy Based Multiple Routing Configurations for Fast Failure Recovery

Abstract

Energy consumption is one of the important issues in communication networks, and it is expected that network devices such as network interface cards will be turned off to decrease the energy consumption. Moreover, fast failure recovery is an important issue in large-scale communication networks to minimize the impact of failure on data transmission. In order to realize both low energy consumption and fast failure recovery, a method called LE-MRC (Low-Energy based Multiple Routing Configurations) has been proposed. However, LE-MRC can degrade network robustness because some links ports are turned off for reducing the energy consumption. Nevertheless, network robustness is also important for maintaining the performance of data transmission and the network functionality. In this paper, for realizing both low energy consumption and fast failure recovery while maintaining network robustness, we propose Robustness and Low-Energy based Multiple Routing Configurations (RLE-MRC). In RLE-MRC, some links are categorized into unnecessary links, and those links are turned off to lower the energy consumption. In particular, the number of excluded links is determined based on the network robustness. As a result, the energy consumption can be reduced so as not to degrade the network robustness significantly. Simulations are conducted on some network topologies to evaluate the performance of RLE-MRC. We also use ns-3 to evaluate how the performance of data transmission and network robustness are changed by using RLE-MRC. Numerical examples show that the low energy consumption and the fast failure recovery can be achieved while maintaining network robustness by using RLE-MRC.