Achieving energy efficiency in data centers with a performance-guaranteed power aware routing

Nowadays, data centers are designed to offer the highest performance in case of high traffic load and peak utilisation of the network. However, in a realistic data center environment, the peak capacity of the network is rarely reached and the average utilisation of devices varies between 5% and 25% which results into a huge loss of energy since most of the time links and servers are idle or under-utilized. The high impact of this wasted power on environmental effects, energy needs and electricity costs raised the concerns to seek for an efficient solution to make data centers more power effective while keeping the desired quality of service. In this paper, we propose a power-aware routing algorithm that saves a considerable amount of energy with a negligible trade-off on the performance of the network and a guaranteed reliability of the system. The key idea is to keep active only the vital and critical nodes participating in the communication traffic and ensuring the reliability while the unneeded devices are turned-off. Vital nodes between clusters (parts of the network) are calculated only once during the initialization of the system and consequently used with a constant time complexity. Besides its short computation time, our routing algorithm guarantees over 50% of energy saving by maintaining the minimum number of needed devices and over 20% when adding backup routes. This power efficiency is accompanied by a guaranteed performance and reliability against failures.