Towards Greener Data Centers via Programmable Data Plane

The energy demands of data centers are increasing and are expected to grow exponentially. Reducing the energy consumption of data centers decreases operational expenses, as well as their carbon footprint. We design techniques to reduce data center power consumption by leveraging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and programmable data plane concepts. Relying solely on in-data plane registers, our proposed system P4Green consolidates traffic in the least number of network switches and shifts workloads to the servers with the available renewable energy. Unlike existing SDN-based solutions, P4Green’s operation does not depend on a centralized controller, making the system scalable and failure-resistant. Our proof-of-concept simulations show that traffic consolidation can reduce data centers’ aggregation switch usage by 36% compared to standard data center load balancing techniques, while workload control can boost renewable energy consumption for 46% of the daily traffic.