ILP-based Energy Saving Routing for Software Defined Networking

Abstract

Software defined networking (SDN) is an emerging technology based on the separation of the control plane and the data plane. This allows to obtain benefits, in comparison with traditional networks, in terms of network management, global monitoring-control, cost reduction, and in particular the energy saving by the strategic activation of devices. In this paper, we propose an approach that seeks to minimize the global energy consumption of the network by suspending inactive devices, such as chassis and line cards, as well as limiting the use of links in traffic sessions. For this purpose, we developed an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model for the SDN routing problem in order to obtain the minimum energy consumption, subject to satisfy all traffic demands. The experimental results on two network topologies for a set of static traffic requests indicate that the proposed model is promising, saving up to 42% of the global energy consumption obtaining a better performance to the models proposed in the literature. On the other hand, the experimental results for incremental semi-dynamic traffic indicate that the performance of the optimization with re-routing improves the approach without re-routing when increasing the traffic in the network, but this improvement is not always perceptible. The approach without re-routing in terms of scalability is promising, by increasing the traffic load not generate interruptions to the traffic already attended and affect the quality of the service.