An SDN Perspective to Mitigate the Energy Consumption of Core Networks – GÉANT2
Résumé
The dense usage of networks in peak times forced network designers to over-provision resources to satisfy the needs during these specific times. Resources such as bandwidth, processing power, and memory are prepared oversized to handle high traffic loads, however, most of these devices are underutilised during the non-peak times and this unlocks the potential to optimise the energy consumption of the resources proportionally to its actual traffic utilisation. Due to the vertical integration of the control and data plane in the conventional network, managing the network is challenging. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a novel networking approach, which provides a programmable and logically centralised control plane, separating the network control from the forwarding devices. Thanks to the features introduced by SDN, the decisions for the network such as routing and forwarding are made globally. In this paper, considering GÉANT network, we proposed a method by which we can remove up to 41% of the link during the peak time traffic and save energy consumption consequently.