Although promising the formidable configuration, vigorous evolution, and satisfactory performance,\nsoftware-defined networking (SDN) is in its initial period all the same. Some essential issues still remain not\ncompletely resolved, and the scalability of control plane is the most intractable one with the explosive increase of\nnetwork traffic. To address this issue, many researchers have proposed multiple controllers to realize logically\ncentralized control layer. Our previous research has proposed multi-controller load balancing approach called\nHybrid Flow. In this paper, taking advantage of Hybrid Flow, we propose an M-N policy multiple-controller sleeping\nmode by switching off redundant controllers when the system is in the light traffic condition. We use queuing theory\nto model the operation procedure of controllers and formulate the energy consumption management issue as a 0-1\ninteger linear programming model. Through turning off the redundant controllers when the system is in the scenario\nof light traffic, the total energy consumption of the whole system can be cut down. Simulation results reveal that the\nproposed M-N policy multiple-controller sleeping mode achieves superior energy efficiency compared to no sleeping\nmode and N policy sleeping mode. However, it introduces tolerable time delay.
Loading....