Software Defined Networking for Reducing Energy Consumption and Carbon Emission

With the exponential growth of the internet use, many organizations use vast amount of energy/power to operate and cool their network infrastructures and thus produce significant amount of carbon waste. The main focus of this research is to design OpenFlow based networks that will result in high speed computer networks and dramatic reductions of energy consumption and carbon emission. Note that optimizing a physical network requires tedious time spent manually debugging hardware, by manipulating a virtual network one may add and remove hosts with the click of a mouse. Mininet virtualization software allows the user to carry out what would normally be tedious processes in the matter of minutes. We also present steps toward converting a typical network set-up into an OpenFlow controlled Software Defined Network (SDN); to reduce the power consumption used by the network. Mininet is useful in visually representing a physical network to optimize power consumption using Software Defined Network.