Assessing the Potential for Saving Energy by Impersonating Idle Networked Devices

Abstract

Abstract-The idea of proxying network connectivity has been proposed as an efficient mechanism to maintain network presence on behalf of idle devices, so that they can "sleep". The concept has been around for many years; alternative architectural solutions have been proposed to implement it, which lead to different considerations about capability, effectiveness and energy efficiency. However, there is neither a clear understanding of the potential for energy saving nor a detailed performance comparison among the different proxy architectures.In this paper, we estimate the potential energy saving achievable by different architectural solutions for proxying network connectivity. Our work considers the trade-off between the saving achievable by putting idle devices to sleep and the additional power consumption to run the proxy. Our analysis encompasses a broad range of alternatives, taking into consideration both implementations already available R. Bolla is with the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering and Naval Architecture (DITEN), University of Genoa, Italy (e-mail: raffaele.bolla@unige.it).R. Khan was with the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering and Naval Architecture (DITEN), University of Genoa, Italy (e-mail: rafiullah.khan@unige.it).M. Repetto is with the National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT), Research Unit of Genoa, Italy (e-mail: matteo.repetto@cnit.it).in the market and prototypes built for research purposes. We remark that the main value of our work is the estimation under realistic conditions, taking into consideration power measurements, usage profiles and proxying capabilities.Index Terms-Green networking, energy efficiency, network connectivity proxy.

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“…Further, different proxying modes and deployment options in the local network have been identified. Authors in [1,15] [4], Gnutella [16], Jabber clients [17], UPnP protocol [18]. Few researchers have investigated a rather more complete proxying framework using different hardware platforms [6,11,19].…”