A generic simulation framework for energy consumption in data center networks

The rapid development of cloud computing stimulates many research works on Data Center Networks (DCNs), among which studies on energy consumption account a considerable proportion. However, a generic simulation tool that is flexible and user-friendly for such studies is still unavailable, which hinders the research in this area as it is impractical for each research group to build a DCN testbed for themselves. To tackle with the issue, this paper presents a generic simulation framework compatible with the network simulator ns-3, which is emerging as a more and more popular network simulator but still lacks built-in DCN simulation package. With our framework, developers could conveniently implement their energy saving algorithm and configure various simulation scenarios. Public interfaces are exposed to help developers monitor DCN operation details such as total power consumption of each node in the entire simulation period. Moreover, two DCN power consumption models are implemented within the framework for the developers' convenience, which enables users to simulate both traffic level and task level energy consumption simulation. Several practical scenarios are simulated and results are presented to demonstrate the validity of with our framework.