Energy Efficiency Support for Software Defined Networks: a Serverless Computing Approach

Automatic network management strategies have become paramount for meeting the needs of innovative real-time and data-intensive applications, such as in the Internet of Things. However, meeting the ever-growing and fluctuating demands for data and services in such applications requires more than ever an efficient and scalable network resource management approach. Such approach should enable the automated provisioning of services while incentivising energy-efficient resource usage that expands throughout the edge-to-cloud continuum. This paper is the first to realise the concept of modular Software-Defined Networks based on serverless functions in an energy-aware environment. By adopting Function as a Service, the approach enables on-demand deployment of network functions, resulting in cost reduction through fine resource provisioning granularity. An analytical model is presented to approximate the service delivery time and power consumption, as well as an open-source prototype implementation supported by an extensive experimental evaluation. The experiments demonstrate not only the practical applicability of the proposed approach but significant improvement in terms of energy efficiency.