Green DataPath for TCAM-Based Software-Defined Networks

A TCAM-based flow table is power-hungry hardware that can provide high-speed lookup operations for packet switching networks. A number of energy-efficient TCAM usage approaches have been proposed in recent literature, but this topic still has not been well studied in the context of traffic engineering for SDN. To this end, aiming to find energy-efficient routing paths for traffic sessions in SDN networks, we propose a novel Green DataPath architecture, where the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) power management technique is introduced. The dedicated SDN controlling module and DVFS-enabled switches are devised for the control plane and data plane, respectively. A framework for energy-efficient routing algorithms is also developed under the proposed architecture and evaluated by extensive simulations using three traffic scheduling schemes.