Optimizing Network Energy Consumption through Intrusion Prevention Systems

Security is of paramount importance in computer networks; in fact network attacks may cause huge economic damages as shown by the fluctuations of stocks of firms subjected to cyber-attacks. For this reason network traffic needs to be purged of malicious traffic before getting to the destination. At the same time the next generation of routers will be able to modulate energy consumption on the basis of actual traffic, thus it would be beneficial to identify and discard malicious packets as soon as possible. In past works, the energy savings enabled by aggressive intrusion detection has been modeled and analyzed, however past model do not take into account the fact that the load of routers diminishes their capability to analyze packets. In this paper we introduce an adaptive model that takes into account the actual load of routers. The model is implemented in a simulator and we show the results of simulations proving that the actual level of energy saving depends upon the network load.