Greening 4-4, 1-4 Data Center Network: A Greedy Approach for Finding an Energy Efficient Sub-network

Data centers are over provisioned to handle traffic surges. However, various studies of data center traffic regarded this upsurge as a rare event and shown that the resources of data center are underutilized. Hence, there is a need to conserve energy by providing control knobs that turn the resources of data center on/off according to the traffic condition. In this paper, we study the ability of 4-4, 1-4 data center network design for energy conservation. Given a set of current flows, we propose a greedy approach to find sub-network that can accommodate current set of flows and switch off rest of the network to conserve energy. We simulated the proposed method using network-simulator (NS3) and compared the performance with Elastic Tree. The simulation results shown performance of 4-4, 1-4 design is better than Elastic Tree in terms of energy conservation, packet delivery ratio and delay. As an extension, we also compared the support from routing protocols: source routing and location based routing, in designing energy conservation methods.