Flow Scheduling in Data Center Networks with Time and Energy Constraints: A Software-Defined Network Approach

Flow scheduling in Data Center Networks (DCN) is a hot topic as cloud computing and virtualization are becoming the dominant paradigm in the increasing demand of digital services. Within the cost of the DCN, the energy demands associated with the network infrastructure represent an important portion. When flows have temporal restrictions, the scheduling with path selection to reduce the number of active switching devices is a NP-hard problem as proven in the literature. In this paper, an heuristic approach to schedule real-time flows in data-centers is proposed, optimizing the temporal requirements while reducing the energy consumption in the network infrastructure via a proper selection of the paths. The experiments show good performance of the solutions found in relation to exact solution approximations based on an integer linear programming model. The possibility of programming the network switches allows the dynamic schedule of paths of flows under the software-defined network management.