GreSDN: Toward a green software defined network

Software defined network (SDN) attracts wide attentions from both research and industry fields because of its properties such as programmability, high flexibility, and controllability. However, the energy waste problem still exists in SDN as well as in the traditional networks. Fortunately, because of the centralized control, energy saving strategies will be easy to be deployed in SDN. Aiming at improving the energy efficient of SDN, a green scheme named GreSDN is designed in this paper. Different from the previous works, GreSDN advocates that minimizing the energy consumption of the network without changing the transmission paths of the traffic flow until they finished. To this end, we propose two heuristic routing algorithms that can be deployed in GreSDN. Simulation results show that the algorithms can improve energy efficiency of the network largely, and have a little impact on the network performance.