Abstract. Energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important in the operation of networking infrastructure, especially in enterprise and data center networks. Researchers have proposed several strategies for energy management of networking devices. However, we need a comprehensive characterization of power consumption by a variety of switches and routers to accurately quantify the savings from the various power savings schemes. In this paper, we first describe the hurdles in network power instrumentation and present a power measurement study of a variety of networking gear such as hubs, edge switches, core switches, routers and wireless access points in both stand-alone mode and a production data center. We build and describe a benchmarking suite that will allow users to measure and compare the power consumed for a large set of common configurations at any switch or router of their choice. We also propose a network energy proportionality index, which is an easily measurable metric, to compare power consumption behaviors of multiple devices.

Abstract-Networking devices today consume a non-trivial amount of energy and it has been shown that this energy consumption is largely independent of the load through the devices. With a strong need to curtail the rising operational costs of IT infrastructure, there is a tremendous opportunity for introducing energy awareness in the design and operation of enterprise and data center networks. We focus on these networks as they are under the control of a single administrative domain in which network-wide control can be consistently applied. In this paper, we describe and analyze three approaches to saving energy in single administrative domain networks, without significantly impacting the networks' ability to provide the expected levels of performance and availability. We also explore the tradeoffs between conserving energy and meeting performance and availability requirements. We conduct an extensive case study of our algorithms by simulating a real Web 2.0 workload in a real data center network topology using power characterizations that we obtain from real network hardware. Our results indicate that for our workload and data center scenario, 16% power savings (with no performance penalty and small decrease in availability) can be obtained merely by appropriately adjusting the active network elements (links). Significant additional savings (up to 75%) can be obtained by incorporating network traffic management and server workload consolidation.

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Radio Frequency Data Communications (RFDC) technology is rapidly becoming a critical component of many traditional industrial engineering functions including materials tracking, inventory control, warehousing, order processing, shipping and database management. As a means of moving information, RFDC has many attractive features, such as speed, accuracy, reliability, convenience and low operating costs. When implementing RFDC systems a major problem is to quickly and efficiently determine the locations where transceivers should be placed so that effective radio communication can take place. The research described in this paper addresses this issue by developing a computerized layout simulation system that incorporates heuristic optimization methods to solve the placement problem. The effectiveness of this unique automated layout methodology is demonstrated by comparing it with the current method of utilizing manual site surveys, as well as with other placement methods. The methodology and solutions are validated by field-testing at actual facilities.