The goal of data center network is to interconnect the massive number of data center servers, and provide efficient and fault-tolerant routing service to upper-layer applications. To overcome the problem of tree architecture in current practice, many new network architectures are proposed, represented by Fat-Tree, BCube, and etc. A consistent theme in these new architectures is that a large number of network devices are used to achieve 1:1 oversubscription ratio. However, at most time, data center traffic is far below the peak value. The idle network devices will waste significant amount of energy, which is now a headache for many data center owners. In this paper, we discuss how to save energy consumption in high-density data center networks in a routing perspective. We call this kind of routing energyaware routing. The key idea is to use as few network devices to provide the routing service as possible, with no/little sacrifice on the network performance. Meanwhile, the idle network devices can be shutdown or put into sleep mode for energy saving. We establish the model of energyaware routing in data center network, and design a heuristic algorithm to achieve the idea. Our simulation in typical data center networks shows that energy-aware routing can effectively save power consumed by network devices.
In a study presented in REF , a heuristic algorithm was designed to save energy from the viewpoint of routing; the authors use the term energy-aware routing to describe it.
Energy-aware routing in data center network
Green Networking '10
Computer Science