Green Communications: Principles, Concepts and Practice

Chapter 17SDN-Enabled Energy-Efficient Network Management

Michael Jarschel¹,², Tobias Hoßfeld¹,³, Franco Davoli⁴,⁵, Raffaele Bolla⁴,⁵, Roberto Bruschi⁵ and Alessandro Carrega⁴,⁵

¹University of Würzburg, Communication Networks, Würzburg, Germany

²Nokia Networks, Munich, Germany

³University of Duisburg-Essen, Modeling of Adaptive Systems, Essen, Germany

⁴Department of Electrical, Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering, and Naval Architecture (DITEN), University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy

⁵National Inter-university Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT), University of Genoa Research Unit, Genoa, Italy

17.1 Introduction

The continuing growth of network content, applications, and services have ultimately resulted in increasing requirements for data storage capacity and data transfer speed, which raise significantly the energy consumption. In order to cope with the limited resources of user devices, more and more applications and services follow the “cloud” paradigm in order to move most of the computational and storage weight to large-scale powerful datacenters [1, 2]. In 2012 alone, such datacenters required 30 billion watts of electricity worldwide [3], which demonstrates the unsustainability of current network infrastructures to satisfy an ever-growing demand for mass ICT services considering the environmental/economic concern.

Indeed, since the Future Internet is currently shaped, it makes sense to investigate new concepts and analyze key aspects, which have the potential ...