Energy saving for OpenFlow switch on the NetFPGA platform based on queue engineering

Springerplus. 2015 Feb 6:4:64. doi: 10.1186/s40064-014-0775-8. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Data centers play an important role in our daily activities. The increasing demand on data centers in both scale and size has led to huge energy consumption that rises the cost of data centers. Besides, environmental impacts also increase considerably due to a large amount of carbon emissions. In this paper, we present a design aimed at green networking by reducing the power consumption for routers and switches. Firstly, we design the Balance Switch on the NetFPGA platform to save consumed energy based on Queue Engineering. Secondly, we design the test-bed system to precisely measure the consumed energy of our switches. Experimental results show that energy saving of our switches is about 30% - 35% of power consumption according to variation of input traffic compared with normal Openflow Switch. Finally, we describe performance evaluations.

Keywords: Data center network; Green networking; Low power; NetFPGA; OpenFlow switch.