Energy Efficiency in Software Defined Networking: A Survey

Software defined networking has solved many challenging issues in the field of networking industry. It separates the control plane from the data forwarding plane. This makes SDN to be more powerful than traditional networking. However, energy cost enhances the overall network cost. Therefore, this issue needs to be addressed to improve design requirements and boost the networking performance. In this article, several energy efficiency techniques have been discussed. To represent it in more detail, a thematic taxonomy of energy efficiency techniques in SDN is given by considering several technical studies of the past research. These studies have been categorized into three sub categories of traffic aware model, end-host aware model and finally rule placement. These models are provided with detailed objective functions, parameters, constraints and detailed information. Furthermore, useful visions of each approach, its advantages and disadvantages and compressive analysis of energy efficiency techniques are also discussed. Finally, the paper is highlighted with the future directions for energy efficiency in SDN.