Joint optimization on switch activation and flow routing towards energy efficient software defined data center networks

The rapid development of cloud computing has raised big concerns over the high energy consumption of modern data centers. To satisfy the ever increasing data traffic needs, the energy consumption of data center network (DCN) also takes a significant proportion. The newly emerging technology, Software Defined Networking (SDN), which allows flexible control of network devices, brings a new opportunity towards DCN energy optimization. In this paper, we investigate how to design an energy-efficient network management strategy with guaranteed satisfaction of network traffic demands in Software Defined Data Center Networks (SD-DCNs). To this end, three issues will be tackled: 1) the subset of switches that shall be activated, i.e., switch activation, 2) multi-path routing scheduling for all flows and 3) forwarding rule placement in SDN switches. They are jointly considered and formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. A heuristic algorithm to deal with its high computational complexity is proposed. Extensive simulation-based evaluations are conducted to validate the high efficiency of our algorithm.