ENERGY OPTIMIZATION OF NETWORKS THROUGH A HYBRID SDN-CRDT ARCHITECTURE: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY BASED ON SYNTHETIC DATA

Increased traffic, denser infrastructure, and the proliferation of distributed services are reinforcing the need for network management strategies that balance performance and energy efficiency. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) simplifies network programming by decoupling the control plane from the forwarding plane, while Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) enable the convergence of replicated data without requiring synchronous coordination for each update. This article explores the potential benefits of a hybrid SDN-CRDT architecture for distributed control state management. A synthetic dataset of 270 observations was generated for three architectures (conventional network, SDN alone, and SDN–CRDT), three network sizes (20, 50, and 100 nodes), three traffic loads, and ten hypothetical repetitions per scenario. The indicators include one-hour energy consumption, latency, throughput, convergence time, control overhead, CPU utilization, and packet loss. At medium load, the hybrid model's synthetic power consumption is 3.3%, 5.8%, and 10.3% lower than that of the conventional network for 20, 50, and 100 nodes, respectively. However, the model attributes these trends to the chosen generation equations; they do not demonstrate a measurable gain or a true superiority. The article formalizes the assumptions, outlines the limitations, and proposes a reproducible validation protocol under Mininet or NS-3.