Enabling experiments for energy-efficient data center networks on OpenFlow-based platform

Energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important in today´s networking infrastructure, especially in data center networks. Recent surveys have shown that the energy utilized by computing and networking components in a data center considerably contributes to its operation costs. Therefore performance and energy issues are important for the design of large multi-tier data centers that can support multiple services. However, the design, analysis, and experiments of such a large and complex system often suffer from the lack of appropriate experimental environments. With this motivation, we present a platform for in-depth analysis of energy-aware data center networks. The platform is a combination of hardware testbed and emulation. Based on real traffic patterns measured in a data center and with the energy model obtained from realistic measurements on NetFPGA-based OpenFlow switches, the experimental platform is designed to capture details of energy consumed by all network components such as links, ports, and switches under different scenarios.