ABSTRACT
In the last years, the world has faced a lot of significant challenges, like the COVID pandemic, or the Russo-Ukrainian War. Among others, both of them indicated that one has to focus on energy efficiency, because the energy prices have skyrocketed. Computer networks are part of our everyday life. Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) provide the ability to communicate with and control directly the network nodes and to ensure a more adaptable as well as better performing packet forwarding. These capabilities make possible to respond quickly and efficiently to network events. This article presents some possible solutions for optimizing SDN networks in terms of energy management. Beside doing a survey on four known methods the authors also present a novel heuristic solution called Modified Heuristic Algorithm for Energy Saving (MHAES). The new method is compared to another heuristic method and to the case of not applying any energy saving measures using simulations with three different topologies. The results show that both heuristic approaches provided significant energy savings and above a request number threshold MHAES clearly outperformed the previous heuristic method. © 2022 IEEE.