Abstract-Improving energy efficiency of Internet equipment is becoming an increasingly important research topic, motivated by the need to reduce energy costs (and Carbon footprint) for Internet Service Providers, as well as increase power density to achieve more switching capacity per-rack. While recent research has profiled the power consumption of commercial routing equipment, these profiles are coarse-grained (i.e., at the granularity of per line-card or per port), and moreover such platforms are inflexible for experimentation with new energysaving mechanisms. In this paper we therefore consider the NetFPGA platform, which is becoming an increasingly popular routing platform for networking research due to its versatility and low-cost. Using a precise hardware-based traffic generator and high-fidelity energy probe, we conduct several experiments that allow us to decompose the energy consumption of the NetFPGA routing card into fine-grained per-packet and perbyte components with reasonable accuracy. Our quantification of energy consumption on this platform opens the doors for estimating network-wide energy footprints at the granularity of traffic sessions and applications (e.g., due to TCP file transfers), and provides a benchmark against which energy improvements arising from new architectures and protocols can be evaluated.

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Sustained exponential bandwidth growth of the Internet is threatened by concomitant increase in power requirements of network switches and routers. Recently, researchers have profiled the energy demand of commercial routing platforms and proposed ways to reduce network power consumption. However, the profiles are coarse-grained, and the platforms are inflexible for experimenting with new schemes for saving energy. In this paper, we consider the NetFPGA platform, which is a popular routing platform for networking research, and make three new contributions. First, we obtain fine-grained measurements of the power consumed by the NetFPGA Gigabit router over a range of packet rates and packet sizes. Second, we propose a simple model that breaks down power consumption of the NetFPGA router at the granularity of per-byte storage and per-packet processing. Lastly, we point to ways of saving network energy based on our fine-grained profile of router power consumption. We believe the results reported in this paper are a first-step towards enabling the use of fine-grained measurement data for energy-optimised network architectures.

The access network is believed to account for 70-80% of the overall energy consumption of wired networks, attributable in part to the large number of small and inefficient switches deployed in typical homes and enterprises. In order to reduce the per-bit energy consumption of such devices, the Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard was approved as IEEE 802.3az in 2010 with the aim of making Ethernet devices more energy efficient. However, the potential for energy savings, and their dependence on traffic characteristics, is poorly understood. This paper undertakes a comprehensive study of the energy efficiency of EEE, and makes three new contributions: First, we perform extensive measurements on three commercial EEE switches, and show how their power consumption profile depends on factors such as port counts, traffic loads, packet sizes, and traffic burstiness. Second, we develop a simple yet powerful model that gives analytical estimates of the power consumption of EEE switches under various traffic conditions. Third, we validate the energy savings via experiments in typical deployment scenarios, and estimate the overall reduction in annual energy costs that can be realized with widespread adoption of EEE in the Internet.

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