Research Area: Software Defined Networks
Achieving energy efficiency has recently become an essential aim of networking research due to the ever increasing power consumption and CO 2 emissions generated by large data networks. For this problem, the emerging paradigm of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) can be seen as an attractive solution. In these networks an energy-aware routing model could be easily implemented leveraging the control and data plane separation. This paper addresses the problem of optimizing the power consumption in SDN using an energy-aware traffic engineering approach that minimizes the number of links that can be used to satisfy a given traffic demand. Different from previous works, we focus on optimizing energy consumption in OpenFlow networks with in-band control traffic. Our approach also considers performance constraints that are crucial in the correct operation of SDN, such as bounded delay for the control plane traffic and load balance between controllers. First, we present a complete formulation of the optimization problem involving the routing requirements for control and data plane communications. To reduce the time complexity of our model in large-scale topologies we derive a heuristic algorithm. Significant values of energy saving (up to 60%) are reached in the simulations using real topologies and demands data.
Keywords:
Energy Efficiency
SDN
OpenFlow networks
traffic
load balance
Author(s) Name: Adriana Fernandez-Fernandez; Cristina Cervello-Pastor; Leonardo Ochoa-Aday
Journal name:
Conferrence name: 2016 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)
Publisher name: IEEE
DOI: 10.1109/GLOCOM.2016.7841561
Volume Information:
