An SDN Focused Approach for Energy Aware Traffic Engineering in Data Centers.

Paris Charalampou,Efstathios D Sykas

doi:10.3390/s19183980

Paris Charalampou, Efstathios D Sykas

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s19183980

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Abstract

There is a lot of effort to limit the impact of CO2 emissions from the information communication technologies (ICT) industry by reducing the energy consumption on all aspects of networking technologies. In a service provider network, data centers (DCs) are the major power consumer and considerable gains are expected by regulating the operation network devices. In this context, we developed a mixed integer programming (MIP) algorithm to optimize the power consumption of network devices via energy aware traffic engineering. We verified our approach by simulating DC network topologies and demonstrated that clear benefits can be achieved for various network sizes and traffic volumes. Our algorithm can be easily implemented as an application in the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm, making quite feasible its deployment in a production environment.

Highlights

The problem of climate change due to global warming is already identified and the research community as well as industry are working on methods to limit its impact
We evaluated the results of our optimization algorithm on various network topologies, sizes and traffic volumes
Due to the nature of data centers (DCs) network topologies, deployments tend to be overprovisioned with sparse utilization even in peak hour

Summary

Introduction

The problem of climate change due to global warming is already identified and the research community as well as industry are working on methods to limit its impact. The following areas have been identified as the main contributors of CO2 emissions: (a) energy production (29%), (b) transportation (27%), (c) industry (21%), (d) agriculture (9%) and (e) information communication technologies (ICT) (9%) [1]. In the area of ICT, a large increase that can reach a total of 15% is expected by the end of 2020 due to the deployment of 5G networks, mass introduction of IoT (Internet of Things) devices, IP traffic generated by video streaming and augmented reality applications. Data centers (DCs) in internet service providers (ISPs) account for more than 45% of the power consumption [2]. Of the total power consumption [4] This figure is expected to rise even more because of NFV

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