Hierarchical power management architecture and optimal local control policy for energy efficient networks

Since energy efficiency has become a significant concern for network infrastructure, next-generation network devices are expected to have embedded advanced power management capabilities. However, how to effectively exploit the green capabilities is still a big challenge, especially given the high heterogeneity of devices and their internal architectures. In this paper, we introduce a hierarchical power management architecture (HPMA) which represents physical components whose power can be monitored and controlled at various levels of a device as entities. We use energy aware state (EAS) as the power management setting mode of each device entity. The power policy controller is capable of getting information on how many EASes of the entity are manageable inside a device, and setting a certain EAS configuration for the entity. We propose the optimal local control policy which aims to minimize the router power consumption while meeting the performance constraints. A first-order Markov chain is used to model the statistical features of the network traffic load. The dynamic EAS configuration problem is formulated as a Markov decision process and solved using a dynamic programming algorithm. In addition, we demonstrate a reference implementation of the HPMA and EAS concept in a NetFPGA frequency scaled router which has the ability of toggling among five operating frequency options and/or turning off unused Ethernet ports.