Matching SDN and Legacy Networking Hardware for Energy Efficiency and Bounded Delay

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.

A Novel Traffic Prediction Method Using Machine Learning for Energy Efficiency in Service Provider Networks

“…In other works by [11], algorithms such as the fixed local heuristic threshold (FLHT) and the dynamic local heuristic threshold (DLHT), which are two locally optimized distributed algorithms, can dynamically adjust the number of active sublinks to save energy consumption by approximately 80% in the CN, for both bin packing and load balancing cases. In telecommunications networks with a higher intelligence using SDN controllers, the sleep port algorithm (SPA) and the two-queue algorithm (TQA) are applied, achieving an energy efficiency of up to 50% for grouped links [12,57]. In [13], the algorithm proposed by the author was able to reduce the average number of active links to 25.4%, using a mechanism based on the SMA prediction technique.…”

“…Regarding LAGs, several energy efficiency studies have been carried out using different optimization methods [6]. Additionally, there are works that propose threshold point algorithms, as in [11], and others [12] that work with software-defined network (SDN) controllers. Moreover, [13] has used predictive techniques to reduce LAG energy, using a simple moving average (SMA).…”

A Comprehensive Survey of Energy-Efficiency Approaches in Wired Networks

“…Based on that and the number of redundant functions required, the minimum number of vCDN functions was computed. In [94], the authors leveraged the IEEE 802.3az functionality in bundles of links to reduce the operation costs in data centers and wired access networks. They presented several algorithms to select output links in bundles in order to increase the effective time they could be out in low-power modes while satisfying the QoS requirements of different applications.…”

Greener, Energy-Efficient and Sustainable Networks: State-Of-The-Art and New Trends

“…The next paper [136] tackles the problem of improving the energy-efficiency of software-defined networking (SDN) equipment based on the concept of traffic aggregation on links between two switches. In the paper, authors present different traffic allocation algorithms for SDN applications, which enable aggregation of the traffic flows to a few ports of the Ethernet links bundle in accordance with the traffic variations.…”