Real-time energy price aware network routing

Abstract

Information and communication technology (ICT) plays an important role in worldwide electricity consumption. Existing routing approaches, oblivious to location-dependent energy prices, incur considerable cost to network operators. We propose a new routing approach in order to minimize electricity cost of core network under multiple electricity market environments. The proposed approach is based on the advantages of using dynamic routing. We use the available electricity price from power utilities to find lowest electricity cost path while electricity price depends on location diversity and time diversity. Depending on the electricity price, alternative geographical paths in the wide area network may be preferred. We evaluate the new approach on two realistic topologies and results show up to 18 percent improvement in electricity cost compared with two naive routing approaches.