Measuring and modeling the power consumption of OpenFlow switches

The power consumption of network devices contributes to a considerable fraction of the energy expenses of data center and service providers. Recently, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a novel networking paradigm that allows optimizing the traffic in a variety of ways, ranging from the Ethernet layer to the network layer and above. This makes SDN a versatile approach for a large number of applications. However, little is known about the power consumption of SDN-enabled networking devices, especially OpenFlow switches. This paper presents measurements and derived power consumption models for two SDN devices, namely an OpenFlow-based hardware switch (NEC PF 5240) and the Open vSwitch running on server grade hardware. The effect of configuration, management, and the managed traffic on the resulting power consumption is evaluated. Based on these measurements, a power model is derived, allowing for an estimation of the power consumption based on the configuration and network traffic only. Being available on the OpenFlow controller, the information about the power model enables an estimation of the power consumption of the full network without additional measurement equipment. The resulting model shows an error of less than 8% for the software switch and less than 1% for the hardware switch.