Enabling experiments for energy-efficient data center networks on OpenFlow-based platform

Energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important in today's networking infrastructure, especially in data center networks. Recent surveys have shown that the energy utilized by computing and networking components in a data center considerably contributes to its operation costs. Therefore performance and energy issues are important for the design of large multi-tier data centers that can support multiple services. However, the design, analysis, and experiments of such a large and complex system often suffer from the lack of appropriate experimental environments. With this motivation, we present a platform for in-depth analysis of energy-aware data center networks. The platform is a combination of hardware testbed and emulation. Based on real traffic patterns measured in a data center and with the energy model obtained from realistic measurements on NetFPGA-based OpenFlow switches, the experimental platform is designed to capture details of energy consumed by all network components such as links, ports, and switches under different scenarios.