An SDN Focused Approach for Energy Aware Traffic Engineering in Data Centers

There is a lot of effort to limit the impact of CO(2) emissions from the information communication technologies (ICT) industry by reducing the energy consumption on all aspects of networking technologies. In a service provider network, data centers (DCs) are the major power consumer and considerable gains are expected by regulating the operation network devices. In this context, we developed a mixed integer programming (MIP) algorithm to optimize the power consumption of network devices via energy aware traffic engineering. We verified our approach by simulating DC network topologies and demonstrated that clear benefits can be achieved for various network sizes and traffic volumes. Our algorithm can be easily implemented as an application in the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm, making quite feasible its deployment in a production environment.