Creation of Topological Maps of Energy Consumption for IP Networks

The efficient management of power consumption on operators’ networks is becoming crucial for network economics, reliability, and sustainability, as longs as the energy consumption of network devices increases with network usage and growth in scale. Nowadays, there are no means of automatically retrieving from the network timely information about the actual energy consumption on different communications paths. This paper concentrates on the creation of topological maps for IP networks (from access to backbone) capturing the current power consumption across paths, by leveraging on standard solutions for that purpose. The resulting maps can be then leveraged as an input for smart and informed decisions for optimization purposes.