Novel Packet Switching for Green IP Networks

A green technology for reducing energy consumption has become a critical factor in ICT industries. However, for the telecommunications sector in particular, most network elements are not usually optimized for power efficiency. Here, we propose a novel energy-efficient packet switching method for use in an IP network for reducing unnecessary energy consumption. As a green networking approach, we first classify the network nodes into either header or member nodes. The member nodes then put the routing-related module at layer 3 to sleep under the assumption that the layer in the OSI model can operate independently. The entire set of network nodes is then partitioned into clusters consisting of one header node and multiple member nodes. Then, only the header node in a cluster conducts IP routing and its member nodes conduct packet switching using a specially designed identifier, a tag. To investigate the impact of the proposed scheme, we conducted a number of simulations using wellknown real network topologies and achieved a more energy-efficient performance than that achieved in previous studies.