Balancing Delays and Energy Consumption in IPS-Enabled Networks

We are witnessing a growing interest around the cost of security in terms of energy consumption. For instance, in wired networking, some proposals have been put forward to try to balance the efficacy of intrusion detection with the need to save energy dynamically, by changing the amount of resources dedicated to security analysis and routing on the basis of current load. These hybrid energy-aware Routers/Intrusion Prevention Systems have the ability to combine the packet forwarding activity with the possibility to perform packet inspection according to the actual energy availability, in such a way that allows sanitizing the traffic and save routing energy. However, while this allows early detection and discard of malicious packets, it may, on the other side, introduce additional delays in the packet delivery. In this paper we empirically assess to which extent the aggressive packet analysis needed to achieve substantial energy savings impacts upon the delay in the packet delivery.