A port consolidation model for data center network infrastructure energy efficiency

Technological advancements have increased the energy consumption of data center network infrastructure causing an increase in global carbon footprints. Consolidation of hardware is considered to be one of the acceptable techniques for reducing energy consumption in data centers. However, consolidation of hardware may result in scarce fault tolerance which consequently leads to performance degradation. Therefore, a technique is required that performs consolidation while data center performance remains unaffected. In this work, a port consolidation model has been proposed. The proposed model diverts the traffic of the ports in a switch to other ports so that the number of active ports can be reduced. The reduction of active ports will result in the energy-efficient utilization of the switch. The proposed diverts the traffic by evaluating the Arrival Rate of packets and the Forwarding Rate of the switch. The proposed algorithm used in the model has been examined through a case study. The proposed model is implemented in integration with our previously proposed network refresh model.