Improving power efficiency in partially deployed software defined networks (SDN)

Power consumption due to internet usage has been growing exponentially fast in the past couple of years. Traditional networks make it difficult to have any coordinated strategy for power efficiency due to the distributed control. That's why Software Defined Networks (SDN) are being considered as they provide a centralized controller with a global network view. Since SDN can co-exist with the traditional networks, there is a need to investigate how to make these partially deployed SDN networks most power efficient giving the best possible performance. In this paper, through extensive simulation of various cases of partial SDN networks, an optimal power efficient network has been explored. A Quality of Service (QOS) based modified heuristic algorithm has been used to further improve the power efficiency of the resultant optimal partial SDN network. The simulation shows that the QOS based modified heuristic algorithm shows good performance and the obtained optimal partial SDN network has a good power efficiency.