Green Network Traffic Engineering Using Segment Routing: an Experiment Report

With the ever-expanding network-based services, environmental impact has become a concern, as the surge in network traffic between devices has only intensified in increased energy consumption. This paper aims to exploit Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) for energy efficiency purposes for data forwarding. SRv6 is a traffic engineering mechanism that enables data packet steering using segments in IPv6 headers. The main idea of the paper is to use SRv6 with automatic rerouting of network traffic based on the resource usage of network devices for higher energy efficiency compared to the traditional IP forwarding based on the shortest path first (SPF) algorithm. The method and system outlined in this paper dynamically created network topologies within Mininet and performed SRv6 using the ROSE platform to route packets through the most energy-efficient paths, all while actively collecting device usages, calculating dynamic weights, computing energy-efficient paths, and rerouting the traffic using SRv6. This paper successfully achieved the goal of energy-aware traffic rerouting. The results showed that the resource usage for SRv6 could be more than 70% lower than that of the SPF-based forwarding, depending on the network topology.