Sleeping mode of multi-controller in green software-defined networking

Abstract

Although promising the formidable configuration, vigorous evolution, and satisfactory performance, software-defined networking (SDN) is in its initial period all the same. Some essential issues still remain not completely resolved, and the scalability of control plane is the most intractable one with the explosive increase of network traffic. To address this issue, many researchers have proposed multiple controllers to realize logically centralized control layer. Our previous research has proposed multi-controller load balancing approach called HybridFlow. In this paper, taking advantage of HybridFlow, we propose an M-N policy multiple-controller sleeping mode by switching off redundant controllers when the system is in the light traffic condition. We use queuing theory to model the operation procedure of controllers and formulate the energy consumption management issue as a 0-1 integer linear programming model. Through turning off the redundant controllers when the system is in the scenario of light traffic, the total energy consumption of the whole system can be cut down. Simulation results reveal that the proposed M-N policy multiple-controller sleeping mode achieves superior energy efficiency compared to no sleeping mode and N policy sleeping mode. However, it introduces tolerable time delay.