Distributed Energy Consumption Management in Green Content-Centric Networks via Dual Decomposition

Due to the in-network caching capability, content-centric networking (CCN) has emerged as one of the most promising architectures for the diffusion of contents over the Internet. Most existing works on CCN focus on network resource utilization, and the energy efficiency aspect is largely ignored. In this paper, we study the tradeoff between energy consumption and quality of service in CCN by switching off the redundant network content routers and links. We formulate the energy consumption management problem as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model and propose a centralized solution via spanning tree heuristic. Then, a fully distributed energy optimization algorithm is proposed via dual decomposition (DD) to solve the MILP problem for green CCN. The DD method transforms the centralized energy consumption control problem into the router status, link status, and link flow subproblems. Through turning off the redundant network devices, the total energy consumption of the network can be minimized. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme exhibits a fast convergence speed and achieves superior energy efficiency compared with other widely used schemes in CCN.