Survey of Routing Techniques-Based Optimization of Energy Consumption in SD-DCN

The increasing power consumption of Data Center Networks (DCN) is becoming a major concern for network operators. The object of this paper is to provide a survey of state-of-the-art methods for reducing energy consumption via (1) enhanced scheduling and (2) enhanced aggregation of traffic flows using Software-Defined Networks (SDN), focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches. We tackle a gap in the literature for a review of SDN-based energy saving techniques and discuss the limitations of multi-controller solutions in terms of constraints on their performance. The main finding of this survey paper is that the two classes of SDN- based methods, scheduling and flow aggregation, significantly reduce energy consumption in DCNs. We also suggest that Machine Learning has the potential to further improve these classes of solutions and argue that hybrid ML-based solutions are the next frontier for the field. The perspective gained as a consequence of this analysis is that advanced ML-based solutions and multi-controller-based solutions may address the limitations of the state-of-the-art, and should be further explored for energy optimization in DCNs.