Network Pruning for Energy Saving in the Internet

Many scientific works propose methods of reducing the amount of energy consumed by the Internet. Although the structure of the Internet was not developed with specific attention to energy consumption, there are various components on which it is possible to act. In the authors' work, they analyze the possibility of affecting the topology of the network. They propose a heuristic called Energy Saving based on TOPology control (ESTOP), which identifies poorly used router line cards by leveraging certain topological properties of the graph modeling an Internet Service Provider (ISP). By acting on these line cards - for example, by putting them into sleep mode - they prune the Internet topology and achieve significant energy savings while preserving the primary topological characteristics of the pruned network.