Green traffic engineering in SDN

Reducing the power consumption of the internet backbone networks is one of the major challenges in computer networks because of high energy cost and environmental issues. SDN is the promising technology that enables fine grain control of network traffic. In this paper, we propose a novel traffic management and routing framework, called SDGTE (Software Defined Green Traffic Engineering), that minimizes the number of turned on links and nodes to reduce the network power consumption. Differently from the approaches that have already been proposed, our solution aims to adapt the network power consumption according to dynamics of network traffic in online manner without prior knowledge of the future traffic matrices. SDGTE is able to run in real time due to low overhead where the prior exact information of traffic would not be available. Results obtained on realistic case studies show that SDGTE saves energy consumption up to 70% while maintaining at most 85% utilization of network links.