Distributed Power Saving for Large-Scale Software-Defined Data Center Networks

Energy efficiency in data center networks (DCNs) is critical to the operations of modern large-scale data centers. One effective way is to make the size of DCNs elastic along with flow demands by centralized routing and scheduling, i.e., turning off idle network components to reduce the power consumption. As such, software-defined networking (SDN) is widely used for achieving such elasticity conveniently. Meanwhile, the scale and structure of modern DCNs get much larger and more complex. Central control and global computing become impractical due to the heavy time and space complexity. Therefore, distributed power control is necessary for large-scale SDN-DCNs, and yet there are few research achievements in this area. In this paper, we present an extensible energy-efficient mechanism, which: 1) leverages distributed flow routing for both intra- and inter-domain elephant flows and 2) extendedly considers distributed energy efficiency for control plane. A local power-saving function is operated within each domain of control plane, and a distributed energy-efficient routing algorithm is computed to optimize the effectiveness for the inter-domain flows. The simulation results demonstrate that this distributed mechanism applies to large-scale DCNs and achieves an effective power saving.