Energy-Aware Routing in Software-Defined Network using Compression

Software-defined Network (SDN) is a new networking paradigm enabling innovation through network programmability. Over past few years, many applications have been built using SDN such as server load balancing, virtual-machine migration, traffic engineering and access control. In this paper, we focus on using SDN for energy-aware routing (EAR). Since traffic load has a small influence on the power consumption of routers, EAR allows putting unused links into sleep mode to save energy. SDN can collect traffic matrix and then computes routing solutions satisfying QoS while being minimal in energy consumption. However, prior works on EAR have assumed that the SDN forwarding table switch can hold an infinite number of rules. In practice, this assumption does not hold since such flow tables are implemented in Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) which is expensive and power hungry. We consider the use of wildcard rules to compress the forwarding tables. In this paper, we propose optimization methods to minimize energy consumption for a backbone network while respecting capacity constraints on links and rule space constraints on routers. In details, we present two exact formulations using Integer Linear Program (ILP) and introduce efficient heuristic algorithms. Based on simulations on realistic network topologies, we show that using this smart rule space allocation, it is possible to save almost as much power consumption as the classical EAR approach.