Energy-aware routing in A4SDN

The concept of Green Computing and, more specifically, energy-aware solutions have gained attention in the last years in many fields of ICT: network management is one of those. Today, power consumption is considered a fundamental parameter, as well as latency, bandwidth or error rate, to take into account when a new routing strategy is designed. In this paper the authors introduce an energy-aware extension of the A4SDN, an algorithm for traffic engineering on SDN based on the Alienated Ant Algorithm, a heuristic solution inspired by a non-natural behaviour of ants colonies. In order to evaluate its performance, the proposed energy-aware approach is compared with the standard A4SDN and with two deterministic solution based on Dijkstra’s Algorithm.