Abstract
The increasing power consumption and related environmental implications currently generated by large data networks have become a major concern over the last decade. Given the drastic traffic increase expected in 5G dense environments, the energy consumption problem becomes even more concerning and challenging. In this context, Software-Defined Networks (SDN), a key technology enabler for 5G systems, can be seen as an attractive solution. In these programmable networks, an energy-aware solution could be easily implemented leveraging the capabilities provided by control and data plane separation. This paper investigates the impact of energy-aware routing on network performance. To that end, we propose a novel energy-aware mechanism that reduces the number of active links in SDN with multiple controllers, considering in-band control traffic. The proposed strategy exploits knowledge of the network topology combined with traffic engineering techniques to reduce the overall power consumption. Therefore, two heuristic algorithms are designed: a static network configuration and a dynamic energy-aware routing. Significant values of switched-off links are reached in the simulations where real topologies and demands data are used. Moreover, the obtained results confirm that crucial network parameters such as control traffic delay, data path latency, link utilization and Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) occupation are affected by the performance-agnostic energy-aware model.
Highlights
Over the last decade, the exponential demand growth and the ever-increasing number of connected devices have forced the necessity to look to the evolution of wireless data communications [1].The adoption of 5G networks, expected by 2020, will allow handling more traffic in dense environments, providing higher data rates and reduced end-to-end latency [2]
Given the high complexity of the proposed optimization problem in large real-world networks, we present a hybrid solution for the energy efficiency problem in Software-Defined Networks (SDN) comprising the main advantages of the two aforementioned solution types
Since the topologies used in our experiments are backbone networks, for the sake of simplicity and without loss of generality, we opted to compute the communications delay as the propagation latency
Summary
The adoption of 5G networks, expected by 2020, will allow handling more traffic in dense environments, providing higher data rates and reduced end-to-end latency [2]. In this scenario, achieving energy efficiency becomes even more concerning and challenging. An effective energy management, as well as enhanced network performance, are essential design goals to fulfill the requirements of future 5G systems for heterogeneous applications and services. Some of these requirements may be in conflict, and specific strategies must be developed. The existing trade-off between energy efficiency and network performance was investigated as part of a conference paper in [5] and is further expanded in this article
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