Power aware OpenFlow switch extension for energy saving in data centers

Data centers play an important role in our daily activities. The increasing demand for data centers in both scale and size has led to huge energy consumption. The cost and environmental impact of data centers increases due to large amounts of carbon emissions. One solution to this problem is to intelligently control the power consumption of switches used in data centers. This paper proposes an extension to OpenFlow switches to support different power saving modes. The extension includes defining new messages in Openflow standard and designing an OpenFlow Switch Controller (OSC) that is able to turn on/off switches and disable/enable ports. To prove the soundness of the proposed extension, the OSC has been used to control the NetFPGA based OpenFlow switches in the ECODANE framework. The results presented in this paper can aslo be used by the OpenFlow compliant switches manufacturer or by power aware research community.