Minimizing energy and link utilization in ISP backbone networks with multi-path routing: a bi-level approach

In recent years, green networking has attracted a lot of attention from device manufacturers and Internet Service Providers (ISP) to reduce energy consumption. In the literature, energy-aware traffic engineering problem is proposed to minimize the total energy consumption by switching off unused network devices (routers and links) while guaranteeing full network connectivity. In this work, we are interested in the problem of energy-aware Traffic Engineering while using multi-path routing (ETE-MPR) to minimize link capacity utilization in ISP backbone networks. To this end, we propose a bi-level optimization model where the upper level represents the energy management function, and the lower level refers to the deployed multi-path routing protocol. Then, we reformulate it as a one-level MILP replacing the second level problem by different sets of optimality conditions. We further use these formulations to solve the problem with classical branch-and-bound, cutting plane, and branch-and-cut algorithms. The computational experiments are performed on real instances to compare the proposed algorithms and to evaluate the efficiency of our model against the existing single-path and multi-objective approaches.