GreenVLAN: An energy-efficient approach for VLAN design

The greening of the Internet has become an important research issue due to the huge energy consumption of the Internet. In this paper, we explore network-level power saving mechanisms in the context of virtual local area networks (VLANs) given their importance and prevalence in enterprise, campus and Data Center Networks (DCNs). After investigating the disadvantages of current VLAN design method, we propose the GreenVLAN approach, which aims at reducing the power usage in the next generation Energy-Efficient Ethernet. The proposed GreenVLAN approach is formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem with the total energy consumption as the objective to be minimized. Besides, we develop a practical heuristic algorithm to solve the proposed model and the complexity of the algorithm is analyzed. Our experiments on both simulated topology and real-world campus network demonstrate that Green-VLAN could achieve considerable power saving (reduce the power consumption of Ethernet links by about 27%~53% for a typical VLAN configuration) compared with current VLAN practice.