PLOFR: An Online Flow Route Framework for Power Saving and Load Balance in SDN

The power consumed by the Internet has been growing sharply in recent years, which accounts for a considerable proportion of the overall power consumption. To reduce high power consumption in the network, numerous proposals on power saving are proposed. Unfortunately, most of them have some side effects, such as load imbalance and even link congestion. Power saving and load balance are two conflicting optimization objectives, and the optimization solutions of them cannot be achieved at the same time. To achieve the desired tradeoff between power saving and load balance, in this article, based on software-defined networking, we first propose a Power-efficient and Load-balanced Online Flow Route framework. Then, we formulate the optimization problem of jointly taking power saving and load balance into account. After proving the problem is NP-hard, we propose the power-efficient and load-balanced flow scheduling algorithm to address it. In addition, we propose a route updating algorithm to enable path updating caused by flow scheduling. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the proposed algorithm outperforms benchmarks on power saving, load balance, and reduces the possibility of link congestion.