Burst2Save: Reducing Network-Induced Energy Consumption in the Home Environment

This paper focuses on the energy efficiency of network-attached home devices, like PCs, tablets, and set-top boxes. These devices already include sophisticated power management schemes, which usually provide a good proportionality level between energy consumption and workload. However, they may become very inefficient in the presence of network-intensive applications and common residential access scenarios (e.g., DSL). As outlined by the experimental results obtained, the origin of this inefficiency fundamentally resides in the gap between (fast) working speeds of power management schemes, and (too slow) network packet inter-arrival times due to the limited bandwidth commonly deployed in residential access. Starting from these considerations, we designed, developed, and experimentally evaluated a simple traffic shaping mechanism, Burst2Save, aimed at mitigating this gap. The Burst2Save allows reducing the energy consumption induced by the network dynamics up to about an order of magnitude without affecting the Quality of Experience (QoE) of end-users under common realistic scenarios.