Exporting data-plane energy-aware capabilities from network devices toward the control plane: The Green Abstraction Layer

Energy efficiency is well-known to have recently become one of the most important aspects for both today's and tomorrow's telecommunications infrastructures. To curb their energy requirements, next-generation hardware platforms of network devices are expected to include advanced power management capabilities, which may allow a dynamic trade-off between power consumption and network performance. At the same time, network protocols are going to evolve in order to carry energy-aware information, and to add them to classical performance indexes in network optimisation strategies. However, the question of how to map energy-aware indexes, often arising from low-level local hardware details, and the ones related to network performance is still an open issue. Starting from these considerations, we propose the Green Abstraction Layer (GAL), a device internal interface that provides a standard way of accessing and organising energy-aware information from the low-level hardware components to control processes. The GAL is specifically designed to hide the heterogeneous hardware implementation details, and to provide a simple, hierarchical, and common view of underlying power management capabilities to network control processes.