Optimization on ports activation towards energy efficient data center networks

Abstract

Nowadays, Internet of thing including network support (i.e. checking social media, sending emails, video conferencing) requires smart and efficient data centers to support these services. Hence, data centers become more important and must be able to respond to ever changing service requirements and application demands. However, data centers are classified as one of the largest consumers of energy in the world. Existing topologies such as ScalNet improves the data center scalability while leading to enormous amounts of energy consumption. In this paper, we present a new energy efficient algorithm for ScalNet called Green ScalNet. The proposed topology strikes a compromise between maximizing the energy saving and minimizing the average path length. By taking into consideration the importance of the transmitted data and the critical parameters for the receiver (e.g. time, energy), the proposed topology dynamically controls the number of active communication links by turning off and on ports in the network (switches ports and nodes ports). Both theoretical analysis and simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate its overall performance in terms of average path length and energy consumption.