Link utility and traffic aware energy saving in software defined networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network paradigm that gains increasing attention both from academia and industry. Energy saving aspects of network protocols, being studied for different network technologies, have also recently been addressed in SDN. In this paper, we address the traffic and energy aware routing problem in SDN and propose link utility based heuristic algorithms, namely NSP and NMU, that are not only general in their applicability but also balance the trade-off between energy saving and performance. We propose an IP formulation for traffic and energy aware routing problem based on link utility information, and evaluate the algorithms using real traces of low, medium and high traffic volumes and network topologies. NSP and NMU are shown to outperform the existing solutions in terms of average path length and achieve up to 37% energy saving.