A Power Benchmarking Framework for Network Devices

Abstract

Abstract. Energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important in the operation of networking infrastructure, especially in enterprise and data center networks. Researchers have proposed several strategies for energy management of networking devices. However, we need a comprehensive characterization of power consumption by a variety of switches and routers to accurately quantify the savings from the various power savings schemes. In this paper, we first describe the hurdles in network power instrumentation and present a power measurement study of a variety of networking gear such as hubs, edge switches, core switches, routers and wireless access points in both stand-alone mode and a production data center. We build and describe a benchmarking suite that will allow users to measure and compare the power consumed for a large set of common configurations at any switch or router of their choice. We also propose a network energy proportionality index, which is an easily measurable metric, to compare power consumption behaviors of multiple devices.

Models for efficient data replication in cloud computing datacenters

“…All these components contribute to the switch energy consumption. According to [18] and [19], the power consumption of switch chassis and line cards remain constant over time, while the consumption of network ports can scale with the volume of the forwarded traffic as follows:…”

Simulation and Performance Analysis of Data Intensive and Workload Intensive Cloud Computing Data Centers

“…As demonstrated by the experiments in [32] the energy consumed by a switch and all its transceivers can be defined as:…”

DENS: data center energy-efficient network-aware scheduling

“…Energy consumption of a switch depends on the: (a) type of switch, (b) number of ports, (c) port transmission rates, and (d) employed cabling solutions. The energy consumed by a switch can be generalized by the following [29]: + where is the power consumed by the switch base hardware, is the power consumed by an active linecard, and corresponds to the power consumed by an active port (transmitter) running at the rate . In Eq.…”

“…(1), only the last component, , scales with a switch's transmission rate. This fact limits the benefits of any rate adaptive scheme as the combined consumption of switch transceivers accounts for just 3-15% of switch's total energy consumption [29]. Both and do not scale with the transmission rate and can only be avoided when the switch hardware is powered down (given that there is no traffic to be handled by the switch).…”