Joint Host-Network Optimization for Energy-Efficient Data Center Networking

Data centers consume significant amounts of energy. As severs become more energy efficient with various energy saving techniques, the data center network (DCN) has been accounting for 20% or more of the energy consumed by the entire data center. While DCNs are typically provisioned with full bisection bandwidth, DCN traffic demonstrates fluctuating patterns. The objective of this work is to improve the energy efficiency of DCNs during off-peak traffic time by powering off idle devices. Although there exist a number of energy optimization solutions for DCNs, they consider only either the hosts or network, but not both. In this paper, we propose a joint optimization scheme that simultaneously optimizes virtual machine (VM) placement and network flow routing to maximize energy savings, and we also build an OpenFlow based prototype to experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our design. First, we formulate the joint optimization problem as an integer linear program, but it is not a practical solution due to high complexity. To practically and effectively combine host and network based optimization, we present a unified representation method that converts the VM placement problem to a routing problem. In addition, to accelerate processing the large number of servers and an even larger number of VMs, we describe a parallelization approach that divides the DCN into clusters for parallel processing. Further, to quickly find efficient paths for flows, we propose a fast topology oriented multipath routing algorithm that uses depth-first search to quickly traverse between hierarchical switch layers and uses the best-fit criterion to maximize flow consolidation. Finally, we have conducted extensive simulations and experiments to compare our design with existing ones. The simulation and experiment results fully demonstrate that our design outperforms existing host-or network-only optimization solutions, and well approximates the ideal linear program.