DDPG-Based Energy-Efficient Flow Scheduling Algorithm in Software-Defined Data Centers

With the rapid development of data centers, the energy consumption brought by more and more data centers cannot be underestimated. How to intelligently manage software-defined data center networks to reduce network energy consumption and improve network performance is becoming an important research subject. In this paper, for the flows with deadline requirements, we study how to design the rate-variable flow scheduling scheme to realize energy-saving and minimize the mean completion time (MCT) of flows based on meeting the deadline requirement. The flow scheduling optimization problem can be modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). To cope with a large solution space, we design a DDPG-EEFS algorithm to find the optimal scheduling scheme for flows. The simulation result reveals that the DDPG-EEFS algorithm only trains part of the states and gets a good energy-saving effect and network performance. When the traffic intensity is small, the transmission time performance can be improved by sacrificing a little energy efficiency