Exploiting Traffic Correlation Towards Energy Saving in Data Centers

Many proposed data center architectures are constructed with a huge number of network devices in order to support the increasing cloud based services. These devices are used to achieve the highest performance in case of full utilization of the network. However, the peak capacity of the network is rarely reached. As a result, many devices are set into idle state which increases the network energy consumption and lead to a non-proportionality between the consumed energy and the network load. In this paper, we present a new approach that reduces the data center energy consumption with a reduced trade off on network performance. By exploiting the correlation in time of internode communication and some topological features, the proposed approach uses the outdated traffic matrix to control the set of active communication links and ports in the network (switches ports and nodes ports). The ports activation management process is done using a proposed algorithm that guarantees network connectivity. Extensive simulations have been conducted to validate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of average path length and energy consumption.