Frequency scaling approach to reduce power consumption of Openflow switches

The significant impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on Greenhouse Gas emissions has caused a considerable research interest in energy management of network devices in recent years. As the amount of power consumption in routers and switches is a function of their working frequency, one approach to energy saving is to adapt working frequency of such devices dynamically and proportional to their traffic load. This paper describes this approach in Software Defined Networking (SDN) framework by proposing a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation for a network of FPGA based interconnected Openflow switches. The prerequisite information of switch power profile is obtained by running experimental tests. The proposed method is applied to an infrastructural dataset extracted from the standard SNDlib database. Simulation results show that frequency scaling technique reduces power consumption by more than 37% in comparison to other well-known power-saving approaches.