SLEEPWELL: Energy Efficient Network Design for the Developing World Using Green Switches

Abstract

Internet is growing rapidly in the developing world now. Stringent budget constraints give rise to networks with tree topology, leaving lesser room to apply energy savings methods proposed in the last decade as there are no redundant links or nodes in the network. In this paper, we propose SLEEPWELL, design of energy efficient network topology using energy aware networking devices. We divide users according to their profile of network usage and users with similar profile are all connected to one switch to allow the switch to sleep. We evaluate our framework using real data collected from the Local Area Network of IIT Kanpur (an Indian university) having more than ten thousand network users. Results show that even in a tree topology, SLEEPWELL achieves substantial energy gains, up to 22% using energy-efficient hardware, without compromising performance. We also show that dividing users in just two profiles accounts for more than 90% of the total energy saved using SLEEPWELL. We also evaluate the overheads occurred and show that the extra cost incurred can be recovered within two years for most of the practical scenarios.