Energy-Aware Routing in SDN Enabled Data Center Network

Energy efficiency is considered a significant concern in the deployment and operation of data networks. The network devices need an enormous amount of energy to function, which leads to an increase in energy consumption in the data center networks (DCNs). Software-defined networking (SDN) solves the problem by adjusting the energy consumption proportionate to the amount of traffic. The network devices with low load can be turned into switch-OFF mode after transferring the traffic to another device. This energy-saving approach by analyzing the user’s traffic demand increases the overall network utilization. In this work, we study the energy optimization problem using multipath routing in SDN-enabled data center networks (SD-DCN). We formulate the energy optimization as an integer linear program (ILP) problem to minimize the active Open vSwitch (OVS) switches in the network. To solve the problem in polynomial time, we propose a heuristic approach to route the traffic flows in the SD-DCN. The proposed approach is tested over data center network topologies – Fat-Tree and BCube. The simulation results show that our proposed approach presents an enhancement of 24%, 16%, and 15% in average delay, throughput, and energy savings in the Fat-Tree topology compared to the benchmark schemes. Further, our proposed approach achieves 17%, 19%, and 17% enhancement in average delay, throughput, and energy savings in the BCube topology compared to the benchmark schemes.