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Green ISP Networks via Hybrid SDN

Authors:
Krishna Kadiyala
Jorge Cobb

Keywords: Software-defined networking; Traffic engineering; Load balancing

Abstract:
The development of Software Defined Networking (SDN) has introduced many benefits to legacy networks, and has become an appealing option for Internet service providers. How- ever, doing a complete overhaul of an existing service provider network in an attempt to transform it into an SDN network is a significant economical, managerial, and technical challenge. To alleviate this, research is being performed on hybrid SDN networks, in which only a few routers are retrofitted to become capable of supporting SDN. In this paper, we study the impact that hybrid SDN can have on the electrical power usage of a service provider network. Most service providers have redundant routers for reliability purposes and for accommodating changes in traffic over time. These redundant routers and links are always powered on, wasting valuable energy. This waste of energy can be mitigated by identifying such routers and shutting them down. However, turning off routers reduces the number of routing paths available to the intra-domain routing protocol, which in turn has the consequence of having an unbalanced traffic load in the egress links of the service provider. This increase in link utilization experienced by some egress links leads to packet losses and long packet delays. To alleviate this, we propose retrofitting a few legacy routers to become SDN routers. By introducing just a few well-placed SDN routers, the routing flexibility increases within the network. This allows for a larger number of routers to be shutdown without exceeding a desired upper bound on link utilization. We present heuristics for choosing which routers should be augmented with SDN capabilities, and we evaluate via simulation their impact on the number of routers than can be powered down.

Pages: 37 to 44

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018

Publication date: October 14, 2018

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2163-9027

ISBN: 978-1-61208-669-9

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 14, 2018 to October 18, 2018