Energy-aware routing in data center network

Abstract

The goal of data center network is to interconnect the massive number of data center servers, and provide efficient and fault-tolerant routing service to upper-layer applications. To overcome the problem of tree architecture in current practice, many new network architectures are proposed, represented by Fat-Tree, BCube, and etc. A consistent theme in these new architectures is that a large number of network devices are used to achieve 1:1 oversubscription ratio. However, at most time, data center traffic is far below the peak value. The idle network devices will waste significant amount of energy, which is now a headache for many data center owners. In this paper, we discuss how to save energy consumption in high-density data center networks in a routing perspective. We call this kind of routing energy-aware routing. The key idea is to use as few network devices to provide the routing service as possible, with no/little sacrifice on the network performance. Meanwhile, the idle network devices can be shutdown or put into sleep mode for energy saving. We establish the model of energy-aware routing in data center network, and design a heuristic algorithm to achieve the idea. Our simulation in typical data center networks shows that energy-aware routing can effectively save power consumed by network devices.