Analyzing Local Strategies for Energy-Efficient Networking

Power management strategies that allow network infrastructures to achieve advanced functionalities with limited energy budget are expected to induce significant cost savings and positive effects on the environment, reducing Green House Gases (GHG) emissions. Power consumption can be drastically reduced on individual network elements by temporarily switching off or downclocking unloaded interfaces and line cards. At the state-of-the-art, Adaptive Link Rate (ALR) and Low Power Idle (LPI) are the most effective local-level techniques for lowering power demands during low utilization periods. In this paper, by modeling and analyzing in detail the aforementioned local strategies, we point out that the energy consumption does not depend on the data being transmitted but only depends on the interface link rate, and hence is throughput-independent. In particular, faster interfaces require lower energy per bit than slower interfaces, although, with ALR, slower interfaces require less energy per throughput than faster interfaces. We also note that for current technologies the energy/bit is the same both at 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps, meaning that the increase in the link rate has not been compensated at the same pace by a decrease in the energy consumption.