A Distributed Sleep-Scheduling Energy-Saving Method in Autonomous Systems

In recent years, due to the increase in internet usage, the energy consumption of communication networks' infrastructures has been significantly increased, resulting in more monetary costs and carbon pollution. To address this challenge, green communication is investigated in order to reduce economic costs and environment pollution of ICT section. In this paper, a distributed sleep-scheduling method is proposed that switches off some network links and nodes in order to save energy during low traffic periods. The proposed approach selects switching-off nodes based on vertex cover problem and the occurrence of their related links. Then, some low-occurrent links in the new topology are switched off if the network performance remains satisfied. The proposed approach does not depend on any central controller and imposes minimum computing and network traffic overload since it does not use the network matrix and profits from the information already provided by link-state protocols. Simulation results performed on real network scenarios show that our proposed technique allows higher network performance compared to other green alternatives, while a significant amount of energy conservation is achieved.