Comparing Energy Efficiencies of SDN Hardware Based on Forwarding Configurations

The energy consumption of the information and communications technology (ICT) sector has been rising steadily and now it contributes to a sizeable portion of the global carbon emissions. The wired-network infrastructure is predicted to consume a significant portion of the total energy consumption in the coming decades, hence research efforts to reduce it are warranted. This research focuses on ascertaining the operational energy efficiency of network devices based on how they are configured. Software-defined networking (SDN) enables decoupling of the control and data planes and allows devices to make forwarding decisions based on simple, uniform forwarding entries. Therefore, SDN hardware is tested in order to normalize the network configurations which allows for a like-to-like comparison of the hardware. The testing results indicate that different device configuration parameters, such as the number of forwarding entries, the type of forwarding entries, the location of forwarding entries (in hardware or software), the number of parallel lookups of different forwarding entries, and the number of tables in which the forwarding entries are stored, have an impact on the Watt/Mbps value of the device.