An Energy-efficient Traffic Scheduling Method based on Slime Mould Algorithm for SDN

Software defined network (SDN) enables efficient and green traffic management by separating the control and data planes. However, the existing itemized scheduling approach is prone to waste of network resources and energy consumption due to the different sensitivity of traffic to time delay. To address these problems, we design a Slime Mould Algorithm based Energy-efficient Traffic Scheduling Method (SMA-ETSM) for SDN. First, we model the traffic scheduling problem with delay requirements to evaluate the decision. Second, in order to minimize the generation of invalid solutions in traffic scheduling, the encoding of the slime mould algorithm is improved, and a slime mould adaptation and update mechanism suitable for energy-efficient traffic scheduling is designed. The experiments show that SMA-ETSM can effectively reduce the energy consumption and improve the overall bandwidth utilization of the network compared with ECMP and ACO algorithm, and it also has some improvement in the operation efficiency compared with the original slime mould algorithm.