Bandwidth-aware energy efficient flow scheduling with SDN in data center networks

Nowadays the energy consumption has become one of the most urgent issues for Data center networks. For general network devices, the power is constant and independent from the actual transfer rate. Therefore the network devices are energy efficient when they are in full workload. The flow scheduling methods based on the exclusive routing can reduce the network energy consumption, as the exclusive routing paths can fully utilize all their links. However, these methods will no longer guarantee the energy efficiency of switches, as they handle flows in priority order by greedily choosing the path of available links instantaneously. In a previous work we proposed an extreme case of flow scheduling based on both link and switch utilization. Herein we consider general scenarios in data center networks and propose a novel energy efficient flow scheduling and routing algorithm in SDN. This method minimizes the overall energy for data center traffic in time dimension, and increases the utilization of switches and meet the flow requirements such as deadline. We did a series of simulation studies in the INET framework of OMNet++. The experiment results show that our algorithm can reduce the overall energy with respect to the traffic volume and reduce the flow completion time on average.