Power Awareness in Network Design and Routing

Abstract

Exponential bandwidth scaling has been a fundamental driver of the growth and popularity of the Internet. However, increases in bandwidth have been accompanied by increases in power consumption, and despite sustained system design efforts to address power demand, significant technological challenges remain that threaten to slow future bandwidth growth. In this paper we describe the power and associated heat management challenges in today's routers. We advocate a broad approach to addressing this problem that includes making powerawareness a primary objective in the design and configuration of networks, and in the design and implementation of network protocols. We support our arguments by providing a case study of power demands of two standard router platforms that enables us to create a generic model for router power consumption. We apply this model in a set of target network configurations and use mixed integer optimization techniques to investigate power consumption, performance and robustness in static network design and in dynamic routing. Our results indicate the potential for significant power savings in operational networks by including power-awareness.

Design for Energy-Aware IP Over WDM Networks with Hibernation Mode and Group-Node Techniques

“…The performance metrics takes into account the average power consumption, blocking probability and average request blocking [9][10][11][12][13]. We also assumed that lightpath requests are uniformly distributed.…”

TCP Window Based DVFS for Low Power Network Controller SoC

“…DVFS, as used in our work, enables higher resolution of power management which is not limited to shut-down of a component, but also enables interchanging different work modes. Chabarek et al [7] use mixed integer programming to optimize router power in a wide area network, by choosing the chassis and line-card configuration to best meet the expected demand. Mandviwalla et al [8] explored using DVS in multi-processor based line-cards.…”

“…Their work compares sleeping vs. rate adaptation in terms of the energy savings achieved across a range of network utilizations. In our work, unlike [7][8] [9], DVFS is based not only on the traffic utilization/load, but also on the network congestion and availability.…”

Greening the NetFPGA Reference Router

“…Many approaches have been proposed to make ICT systems more energy efficient [6,7]. The majority of these proposed approaches can be divided into two categories: power scaling and sleep mode [8][9][10].…”