GREEN SDN — An enhanced paradigm of SDN: Review, taxonomy, and future directions

SummaryNetwork architectures nowadays are not able to address the requirements of future Internet, as they are not sufficient, ossified, and are power hungry on the TCP/IP paradigm. Therefore, to promote the realizable progression toward the new paradigms and modern protocols, modern routers are required to become programmable for the flexible control and dynamic management of both power states and traffic flows. In this scenario, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is considered as an exemplary approach for providing the support of dynamic traffic flows of each node on a network. Besides the benefits that SDN brought to the networking area, there are still crucial challenges such as to design an effective, lightweight API, rich algorithms, and traffic forwarding rules for SDN layers along with the adoption of an energy efficient infrastructure that could have the least effect on the environment. The aim of this research is to drive the attention toward environment friendly adoption and implementation of SDN that could deal with the growing number of users and network equipment. For this purpose, in this research, a comprehensive review on SDN while mapping the characteristics of green computing with SDN is provided. In addition to that, the research stressed on the benefits of Green SDN through a proposed G‐SDN framework. Some well‐defined case studies are presented to highlight the need of greening an SDN infrastructure. Finally, various research directions are presented to the wide adoption of SDN technology for academia and industry alike.