Energy-saving model for SDN data centers

With the development of the Internet, data centers have become vital infrastructures which provide computing, storage and other services for the networks. According to statistics, data centers consume large amount of electricity all around the world. In most cases, the majority of network devices in data centers are relatively idle, resulting in a waste of energy. Software defined network (SDN) was proposed by UC Berkeley and Stanford University around 2008, which allows the administrators to manage the network and set configurations through abstraction of lower level functionality. It also separates the control plane and the data plane, so administrators can control the network traffic through centralized controller instead of access to physical devices. This paper discusses the energy-saving model in data center networks based on SDN. We propose two different energy-saving algorithms, which can be applied to different data centers. Through centralized management and preprocessing traffic by SDN, we get better energy efficiency and reduce the energy cost by 30-40 %. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on energy saving in SDN architecture which provides two different algorithms that can be applied in different scenarios.