Framework for Traffic Proportional Energy Efficiency in Software Defined Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) achieves programmability of network elements by separating the control and the forwarding planes, and provides efficiency through optimized routing and flexibility in network management. As the energy costs contribute largely to the overall costs in networks, energy efficiency is a significant design requirement for modern networking mechanisms. However, designing energy efficient solutions is complicated since there is a trade-off between energy efficiency and network performance. In this paper, we propose traffic proportional energy efficient framework for SDN and heuristics algorithm that maintains the tradeoff between efficiency and performance. We also present IP formulation for traffic proportional energy efficiency problem. Comprehensive experiments conducted on Mininet emulator and POX controller using Abilene, Atlanta, and Nobel-Germany real-world topologies and traffic traces show that our approach saves up to 50% energy while achieving a performance closer to the algorithms prioritizing performance.