SDN Traffic Flows in a Serverless Environment: a Categorization of Energy Consumption

The widespread adoption of Software Defined Networks (SDN) in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sectors has positioned it as a crucial technology due to its flexibility and modularity, which results from shifting control from physical network devices to software controllers. However, this shift has led to several challenges, including increasing energy consumption. Serverless computing can effectively support SDN to address various issues, such as energy efficiency, yet lacks an energy-aware scheduling framework designed for such an environment. This research investigates the key factors influencing serverless energy consumption in SDN by examining the correlations between the energy usage of serverless applications and traffic flow patterns, as such correlations can play a critical role in developing an energy-aware scheduling framework. The findings reveal that several traffic patterns strongly or moderately impact energy consumption in serverless environment.