Abstract
Both economic and environmental costs are driving much research in the area of the energy efficiency of networking equipment. This research has produced a great amount of proposals. However, the majority of them remain unimplemented due to the lack of flexibility of current hardware devices and a certain lack of enthusiasm from commercial vendors. At the same time, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has allowed customers to control switching decisions with a flexibility and precision previously unheard of. This paper explores the potential convergence between the two aforementioned trends and presents a promising power saving algorithm that can be implemented using standard SDN capabilities of current switches, reducing operation costs on both data centers and wired access networks. In particular, we focus on minimizing the energy consumption in bundles of energy-efficient Ethernet links leveraging SDN. For this, we build on an existing theoretical algorithm and adapt it for implementing with an SDN solution. We study several approaches and compare the resulting algorithms not only according to their energy efficiency, but also taking into account additional QoS metrics. The results show that the resulting algorithm is able to closely match the theoretical results, even when taking into account the requirements of delay-sensitive traffic.
Highlights
Nowadays, public concern about energy consumption of networking equipment is increasing due to environmental reasons, and economic ones
The Open vSwitch switches employed by Mininet have an OpenFlow API accessible by Open Network Operating System (ONOS), but it cannot reproduce exactly the EEE capabilities, so we measured the average occupation of each outgoing link as a proxy for the corresponding energy consumption
The main focus of this paper has been the minimization of the energy consumption in networking equipment with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities when the traffic traverses an aggregate of links between two switches
Summary
Public concern about energy consumption of networking equipment is increasing due to environmental reasons, and economic ones. A wide range of solutions has been proposed to reduce the energy consumption of networking equipment. Many of these new techniques remain unimplemented due to the lack of flexibility in current networks. Toff (ρ) + TS + TW where ρ is the traffic load, σoff is the relative energy consumption of the EEE idle mode and TS and TW are the time needed to enter and exit the LPI mode, respectively. They are constant parameters dependent on the physical interface characteristics. Toff (·) is the average length of the idle periods, which depends on both the algorithm governing the idle mode and the actual traffic load
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