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Energy conservation is drawing increasing attention in data networking. As networks are designed for peak traffic, network elements typically operate at full speed and consume maximum power even when carrying low traffic. One school of thought believes that a dominant amount of power saving comes from turning off network elements. The difficulty is that transitioning between the active and sleeping modes consumes considerable energy and time. This results in an obvious trade‐off between saving energy and provisioning performance guarantees such as end‐to‐end delays. We study the following routing and scheduling problem in a network in which each network element either operates in the full‐rate active mode or the zero‐rate sleeping mode. For a given network and traffic matrix, routing determines the path that each traffic stream traverses. For frame‐based periodic scheduling, a schedule determines …