This article is part of a Special Issue on ICT-based Strategies for Environmental Conflicts.
The reduction of energy expenditure of communication networks represents a key issue for the research community. A promising technique acting in this direction is known as "resource consolidation". It consists in concentrating the workload of an infrastructure on a reduced set of devices, while switching off the others. Deciding on the set of devices that can be safely switched off requires an accurate evaluation of their criticality in the network. We define here a measure of criticality that takes into account not only the network topology, but also the traffic, and different possible network configurations. We model the scenario as a coalitional game. Shapley value ranking is efficiently used to drive the resource consolidation procedure. Numerical results, on real network scenarios, confirm the robustness and relevance of the proposed index in measuring criticality, yielding a good tradeoff between energy efficiency and network robustness, and outperforming other classical indexes.
