ETHoS: Energy-Aware Traffic Engineering for Sustainable Hybrid SDN

Abstract

In this paper, we present a traffic engineering scheme for sustainable hybrid Software-Defined Networks (SDN) to reduce the overall energy consumption of the network and increase the amount of programmable traffic. Hybrid SDN involves both legacy and SDN switches because of the migration from a legacy network to an SDN. The primary reason for this migration is to increase the amount of programmable traffic and add flexibility to network management operations such as network monitoring, load distribution, and energy management. The energy management solutions in SDN include dynamic activation or deactivation of network elements and traffic rerouting. However, there exists a trade-off between energy-aware routing and programmable traffic, as unplanned traffic rerouting may transform programmable traffic into a non-programmable one. In this paper, we propose a scheme for dynamic activation of SDN links and optimal route selection of existing flows. In contrast to the previous works, we focus on reducing energy consumption, while maximizing the programmable traffic, as it serves the primary intent of transforming a legacy network into an SDN. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme, ETHoS, increases the energy savings by <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$28.91\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> compared to SENEtoR, an existing scheme.