Improving the energy efficiency of software-defined backbone networks

Radu Carpa (1, 2) , Olivier Glück (3, 1, 2) , Laurent Lefèvre (2) , Jean-Christophe Mignot (1)

1 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme
2 AVALON - Algorithms and Software Architectures for Distributed and HPC Platforms
3 ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon

The continuous growth of traffic and the energy consumption of network equipments can limit the deployment of large-scale distributed infrastructure. This work aims to improve the energy efficiency of backbone networks by dynamically adjusting the number of active links according to network load. We propose an intra-domain software-defined network approach to select and turn off a subset of links. The SPRING protocol (a.k.a. segment routing) is used to make our algorithms converge faster. The algorithms—implemented and evaluated using the OMNET++ discrete event simulator—can achieve energy savings of around 44 % when considering real backbone networks.

Mots clés: MPLS; SPRING; Segment routing; Energy efficiency; Backbone networks; SDN; Traffic engineering

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Radu Carpa, Olivier Glück, Laurent Lefèvre, Jean-Christophe Mignot. Improving the energy efficiency of software-defined backbone networks. Photonic Network Communications, 2015, 30 (3), pp.337-347. ⟨10.1007/s11107-015-0552-9⟩. ⟨hal-01246376⟩