Abstract-Reduction of unnecessary energy consumption is becoming a major concern in wired networking, because of the potential economical benefits and of its expected environmental impact. These issues, usually referred to as "green networking", relate to embedding energy-awareness in the design, in the devices and in the protocols of networks.In this work, we first formulate a more precise definition of the "green" attribute. We furthermore identify a few paradigms that are the key enablers of energy-aware networking research. We then overview the current state of the art and provide a taxonomy of the relevant work, with a special focus on wired networking. At a high level, we identify four branches of green networking research that stem from different observations on the root causes of energy waste, namely (i) Adaptive Link Rate, (ii) Interface proxying, (iii) Energy-aware infrastructures and (iv) Energy-aware applications. In this work, we do not only explore specific proposals pertaining to each of the above branches, but also offer a perspective for research.

Abstract-In this work, we analyze the design of green routing algorithms and evaluate the achievable energy savings that such mechanisms could allow in several realistic network scenarios. We formulate the problem as a minimum energy routing optimization, which we numerically solve considering a core-network scenario, which can be seen as a worst-case for energy saving performance (as nodes cannot be switched off). To gather fullrelief results, we analyze the energy savings in various conditions (i.e., network topology and traffic matrix) and under different technology assumptions (i.e., the energy profile of the network devices).These results give us insight into the potential benefits of different "green" technologies and their interactions. In particular, we show that depending on the topology and traffic matrices, the optimal energy savings can be modest, partly limiting the interest for green routing approaches for some scenarios. At the same time, we also show that the common belief that there is a trade off between green network optimization and performance does not necessarily hold: in the considered environment, green routing has no effect on the main network performances such as maximum link utilization.