Energy-aware Backbone Networks: a Case Study

Power consumption of ICT is becoming more and more a sensible problem, which is of interest for both the research community, for ISPs and for the general public. In this paper we consider a real IP backbone network and a real traffic profile. We evaluate the energy cost of running it, and, speculating on the possibility of selectively turning off spare devices whose capacity is not required to transport off-peak traffic, we show that it is possible to easily achieve more than 23% of energy saving per year, i.e., to save about 3GWh/year considering today's power footprint of real network devices.