Energy-aware Resource Adaptation for Next Generation Network Equipment

Besides a more widespread sensitivity to ecological issues, the interest in energy-efficient network technologies springs from heavy and critical economical needs, since both energy cost and network electrical requirements show a continuous growth, with an alarming trend over the past years. In this contribution, we explore and try to evaluate the feasibility and the impact of power management policies able to well suit a heterogeneous set of highly modular architectures, generally used for developing today’s network equipment. The proposed policies aim at optimizing the power consumption of each device component with respect to its expected network performance. Finally, in order to provide an experimental evaluation of the proposed ideas, we applied such power management policies to a new generation SW router platform, and we evaluated it with real traffic traces.