Green extension of OpenFlow

Today´s network architectures are not able to cope with the Future Internet requirements, as they are too inefficient, power hungry, and ossified on the TCP/IP paradigm. In order to promote a viable evolution towards new protocols and paradigms, modern network routers should become programmable to allow a flexible management of both traffic flows and power states. In this respect, Software Defined Networking (SDN) can represent the perfect support for the allocation of traffic flows and, at the same time, the management of the power states of the single nodes. To this purpose, this paper proposes to use the Green ion Layer (GAL) to integrate the exchange of power management data among network elements and the application of control strategies inside the SDN paradigm. Moreover, in order to clarify how our study would help overcoming scalability issues and promote energy efficiency at the same time, this paper defines and solves a consolidation problem where the network is described in terms of allocation of packet handling resources and power states.