Intelligent path control for energy-saving in hybrid SDN networks

As power consumption of the internet has been growing quickly in recent years, saving energy has become an important problem of networking research. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) brings excellent opportunities to improve network performance and reduce energy consumption by flexible centralized control. However, due to budget constraints and technique limitations, ISPs can upgrade only a limited number of conventional switches in backbone networks to SDN devices at one time. In this paper, we propose one heuristic scheme for incrementally deploy SDN switches in hybrid SDNs, the objective of which is to achieve energy saving by rerouting the flows to shut down idle links and switches as many as possible. Our solution can achieve two objectives: 1) maximizing the network control ability with a given SDN switches upgrading budget constraint, and 2) maximizing energy saving by shutting down idle links and switches with deployed SDN switches. The results of evaluations show that our scheme can achieve 95% of the number of flows controlled with only 10% of upgrading cost, and it also can achieve saving more about 10% of the total power consumption when compared to the existing solutions.