RESEARCH Open Access Energy saving for OpenFlow switch on the NetFPGA platform based on queue engineering Tran Hoang Vu * , Vu Cong Luc, Nguyen Trung Quan, Nguyen Huu Thanh and Pham Ngoc Nam Abstract Data centers play an important role in our daily activities. The increasing demand on data centers in both scale and size has led to huge energy consumption that rises the cost of data centers. Besides, environmental impacts also increase considerably due to a large amount of carbon emissions. In this paper, we present a design aimed at green networking by reducing the power consumption for routers and switches. Firstly, we design the Balance Switch on the NetFPGA platform to save consumed energy based on Queue Engineering. Secondly, we design the test-bed system to precisely measure the consumed energy of our switches. Experimental results show that energy saving of our switches is about 30% - 35% of power consumption according to variation of input traffic compared with normal Openflow Switch. Finally, we describe performance evaluations. Keywords: OpenFlow switch; NetFPGA; Low power; Data center network; Green networking Introduction One of the most important issues that many researches of today society are very concerned for is to save energy consumption in data centers. A research, the Datacenter Dynatmics 2012 Global census shown that the con- sumed power in data centers between 2011 and 2012 rose significantly to 63% with 38GW (Sverdlik et al. 2011); in which the network devices consumes around from 20% to 30% of this energy (Heller et al. 2010; The Green Grid). On the other hand, the cost of consumed energy on data centers was about 44% of total costs (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’ s Data Center Report to Congress). At the same time, along with huge energy consumption, data centers also emitted a large amount of carbon dioxide. In (The Green Grid), we can also see that energy con- sumption of components in a data center (Figure 1). It is clear that the proportion of the energy consumption of IT devices in the data center is significant, about 30%. Thus, one of the most controversial issues today relates to saving the energy consumption of network devices. There are some solutions to solve this problem such as reducing the clock rate from125 MHz to 62.5 MHz by changing the value of a hardware register according to the input bit rate (Lombardo et al. 2012). In this solution, the frequency is only reduced to a half of the original frequency and this clock frequency variation only affects a part of the NetFPGA board. Another method proposed in (Meng et al. 2012), the clock fre- quency is divided into lower levels from 125 MHz to 3.096MH according to the real time workload. However, it only applies to pipeline blocks in the User Data Path (UDP) (Figure 2). In addition, in (Hanay et al. 2012) given another approach that changes the link rate on the ports (1GB/100Mb/10 Mb) according to the queue length by reducing the frequency of Ethernet MAC block to 25 MHz. In this method, the research is only applied for particular Ethernet MAC blocks. Overall, these solutions are not really effective in saving the consumed energy be- cause of some above- analyzed restrictions. Moreover, in (Thanh et al. 2012), (Heller) shown that the traffic through switches and routers varies signifi- cantly according to time the input traffic peaks during the day and falls at night. However, the energy consump- tion of these devices remains constant that wastes en- ergy. Thus, we should design the new network devices that consume energy according to the input traffic. In this paper, we describe a design – Balance Switch to save the power consumption of OpenFlow switches using in data centers by changing the operating frequence * Correspondence: vu.tranhoang@hust.edu.vn Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam a SpringerOpen Journal © 2015 Tran et al.; licensee Springer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. Vu et al. SpringerPlus (2015) 4:64 DOI 10.1186/s40064-014-0775-8