A hop-by-hop energy efficient distributed routing cheme

Energy inefficiencies in current networks provide both challenges and opportunities for energy saving. Recently, there are many works focusing on minimizing energy cost from the routing perspective. However, most existing work view them as optimization problems and solve them in a centralized manner such as with a solver or using approximations. In this paper, we focus on a network-wide bi-objective optimization problem, which simultaneously minimizes the total energy consumption using speed scaling and the total traffic delay. We propose a hop-by-hop dynamic distributed routing scheme for the implementation of this network-wide optimization problem. Our scheme is more practical to realize in large distributed networks compared with current centralized energy minimization methods. We can also achieve near global optimal in a distributed manner, while most used shortest path routing protocols such as OSPF cannot make it. Our routing scheme is totally distributed and maintains loop-free routes in every instant. Simulations conducted in real data sets show that the distributed loop-free routing scheme converges to near Pareto optimal values. Also, our method outperforms the widely applied shortest path routing strategy by 30% in energy saving.