Today's data center networks consume a great amount of energy, which significantly aggravates the operational cost of data centers and the carbon footprint. It is an ideal objective for operators to make the power consumption of data center networks proportional to the amount of network loads they carry. To this end, many recent researches are focusing on two representative methods: device-level sleeping technology and network-wide energy aware routing. It is important for operators to understand what effects these energy conservation methods have on improving the network energy proportionality. In the paper, we make a comparison study on the energy proportionality of data center networks, based on regular routing and energy-aware routing. Specifically, we first choose several typical data center network architectures and equalize their network performance. Afterwards, we analyze the maximum power consumption of data center networks without using any energy conservation strategy, and compare their energy proportionality when employing the sleeping technology and energy-aware routing respectively.
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