Integer Programming Based Optimization of Power Consumption for Data Center Networks

With the quickly developing data centers in smart cities, reducing energy consumption and improving network performance, as well as economic benefits, are essential research topics. In particular, Data Center Networks do not always run at full capacity, which leads to significant energy consumption. This paper experiments with a range of optimization tools to find the optimal solutions for the Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model of network power consumption. The study reports on experiments under three communication patterns (near, long, and random), measuring runtime and memory consumption in order to evaluate the performance of different ILP solvers. While the results show that, for near traffic pattern, most of the tools rapidly converge to the optimal solution, CP-SAT provides the most stable performance and outperforms the other solvers for the long traffic pattern. On the other hand, for random traffic pattern, GUROBI can be considered to be the best choice, since it is able to solve all the benchmark instances under the time limit and finds solutions faster by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude than the other solvers do.