Balancing Energy, Redundancy, and Performance in Datacenter Networks

Abstract

The current large-scale datacenters typically adopt redundancy of servers and communication devices for increased reliability and availability. A highly redundant infrastructure, however, is one of the challenges of the area due to the high energy consumption. This paper presents BEEP, an energy-efficient strategy for datacenter networks based on the Fat Tree topology. Our strategy uses multipaths and the global view offered by software-defined networks to balance the energy efficiency, the equipment redundancy level, and the performance gain when dealing with the traffic demands. BEEP was implemented in an OpenFlow network and the multipaths were implemented using MPTCP (Multipath TCP). The experimental results in variants of the Fat Tree topology show gains in the energy efficiency with the strategy in the order of 30% to 45%, in addition to a better utilization of the available bandwidth, as more alternative paths are available.