SDN Based Solutions for Energy Efficient Networks

The concept of energy-efficient networking is beginning to become popular in the past few years, gaining increasing importance. Besides the widespread sensitivity to ecological issues, such interest also stems from economic needs, since both energy costs and electrical requirements of telecom providers and Internet Service Providers' infrastructures around the world show a continuously growing trend. Thus, for boosting the network energy efficiency, there is a need to explicitly manage energy saving, by exploiting network-specific features. Energy consumption also accounts for a major part of the operational cost of a data center. This paper presents an approach to provision servers in such a manner to optimize cost and energy in a network. The performance of such a provisioning scheme is compared to the existing Round-Robin scheme to achieve a decrease in server utilization and consequently an increase in energy efficiency and power saving. This is implemented using the Software Defined Networking paradigm.