Profiling per-packet and per-byte energy consumption in the NetFPGA Gigabit router

Abstract

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.

An experimental power profile of Energy Efficient Ethernet switches

“…This is far from the proportional relation and results in poor energy efficiency as networks tend to be lightly loaded [26]. Similar results are obtained for commercial Ethernet switches in [23], and in our study of an FPGA-based prototype router in [25]. We will corroborate this result for small Ethernet switches in our experimental study by considering an 8-port Cisco Catalyst switch that does not have EEE support.…”

“…The power consumption of switches and routers has been characterized in different studies such as [23,24] and our own study in [25]. The results show that once the switch is powered on and its ports are activated, the power consumption is close to its maximum value.…”

Simulation toolbox for studying energy consumption in wired networks

“…The last model relies on the fact that the energy consumption of some interfaces depends on the traffic in two ways: it depends on the number of Bytes (because they need to be written in memory for instance), and it depends on the number of packets (because they need to be processed: reading the headers for instance) [9]. Table I summarizes the possible attributes per energy model, with the unit and the data format of each attribute.…”

“…Sivaraman et al [9] provide the results of power consumption experiments on real equipment. These experiments show the linear relationship that exists between traffic volume (in Mbps) and power consumption (in Watts) for fixed packet sizes of 100, 576, 1000, and 1500 Bytes.…”

Greening the NetFPGA Reference Router

“…Power consumption measurements were taken using a smart PCI bus extender, a data acquisition unit (DAQ) and associated software. As mentioned in [27,28], the PCI bus extender could precisely measure the real-time power consumption of a PCI-based board. The DAQ is optimized for superior accuracy at fast sampling rates.…”