A Multi-Objective Routing Mechanism for Energy Management Optimization in SDN Multi-Control Architecture

This paper proposed and implemented an energy-aware routing multi-level and mapping problem (EARMLP) algorithm to minimize the overall power consumption in Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based core networks. To enforce network utilization toward green policies design for Data Centers (DCs), SDN leverages protocol configurations for routing available in the infrastructure. Therefore, the proposed mechanism aimed to design an optimal routing strategy that considers system configuration and traffic demand between the data and control planes in networks. The problem is then addressed from the perspective of the policy-based EARMLP technique, which is used to carefully determine the optimal assignment between controllers and their switches to optimize network energy savings. Hence, a controller placement problem (CPP) is established to select the optimal locations and number of controllers in core networks and create an optimal mapping and resource allocation between switches and controllers. Since the formulated energy-aware routing algorithm is designed as a multi-objective NP-hardness of the problem, a heuristic approach is developed to find optimal solutions for traffic routing between inter-controllers and controller-switch in terms of energy-aware consumption strategies. Consequently, the proposed optimal routing mechanism can rearrange traffic to meet provisioning criteria by utilizing the capacity-aware design. Remarkably, the energy saved in networks by our suggested method can approach up to 70% of the energy saved in SDN-based networks compared to other methods.