Due to the increasing of energy consumption in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), green computing has recently drawn a lot of attention. However, the application of green networking to Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) has seldom been reported in the literature. In this paper, we propose a new framework for energy management in TDMA-based WMNs to support energy efficient communications. Our proposed framework aims at finding an optimal tradeoff between the achieved network throughput and energy consumption. To do so, we use resource planning through green routing and link scheduling. Specifically, we first propose an Optimal approach, called O-GRLS, by formulating the problem as an integer linear program (ILP). As this problem is known to be NP-hard, we then propose a simple yet efficient Ant Colony-based approach, called AC-GRLS to solve the formulated ILP problem. Through extensive simulations, we show that our green framework is able to achieve significant gains in terms of energy consumption as well as achieved network throughput, compared to the Shortest Path (SP) routing. Specifically, we show that the same performance as SP can be attained with minimum energy consumption. On the other hand, with the same energy cost, our proposed framework enhances the achieved throughput by up to 30% compared to SP routing.
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