Abstract (EN)

The energy consumed by communication networks can be reduced in several ways. A promising technique consists in concentrating the workload of an infrastructure on a reduced set of devices, while switching off the others, and is referred to as resource consolidation. This technique is particularly suited to routing of data traffic when a network is lightly loaded, but the selection of the routers that can be safely switched off requires an accurate evaluation of the criticality of the devices. In this article, we define a measure of the criticality of the different interconnection devices that does not only take into account a network topology but also its traffic matrix. We model the scenario as a coalitional game, and show how the use of the Shapley value associated to the nodes can be used as criticality indexes. This index is compared with other classical indexes on realistic topologies. We find out that our index provides a robust and relevant criticality measure achieving a good tradeoff between energy efficiency and network robustness.