An empirical model of power consumption in the NetFPGA Gigabit router

Abstract

Sustained exponential bandwidth growth of the Internet is threatened by concomitant increase in power requirements of network switches and routers. Recently, researchers have profiled the energy demand of commercial routing platforms and proposed ways to reduce network power consumption. However, the profiles are coarse-grained, and the platforms are inflexible for experimenting with new schemes for saving energy. In this paper, we consider the NetFPGA platform, which is a popular routing platform for networking research, and make three new contributions. First, we obtain fine-grained measurements of the power consumed by the NetFPGA Gigabit router over a range of packet rates and packet sizes. Second, we propose a simple model that breaks down power consumption of the NetFPGA router at the granularity of per-byte storage and per-packet processing. Lastly, we point to ways of saving network energy based on our fine-grained profile of router power consumption. We believe the results reported in this paper are a first-step towards enabling the use of fine-grained measurement data for energy-optimised network architectures.

Profiling per-packet and per-byte energy consumption in the NetFPGA Gigabit router

“…In the following subsections we first outline our experimental setup and methodology, and then describe in detail each experiment that helps us estimate specific components of the energy model. We note that the results presented here expand vastly on our earlier abstract [9]: we repeat our earlier experiments for a larger parameter set to obtain higher confidence in the results, and additionally conduct new experiments to decompose the per-byte energy into the receive and transmit side components.…”

“…Using these, we devise a series of experiments that allow us to quantify the per-packet processing energy, per-byte energy for receipt and storage at the ingress to the router, as well as per-byte energy for queueing and transmission at the egress of the router. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work (barring our own preliminary abstract [9]) that gives such a fine-grained profile of energy consumption on the NetFPGA platform, which will be of great value to the community. This profile opens the doors to deducing network-wide energy footprints at various levels such as traffic sessions, applications, or user-groups.…”

A measurement-based model of energy consumption for PLC modems

“…Several recent works have developed models of energy consumption using measurements on systems such as femtocells [1], NetFPGA Gigabit routers [2], [3], and Optical-IP routers [4]. In all these previous works, the authors proposed various formal models for the power consumption, with the device load being as the main optimization criteria.…”

Greening the NetFPGA Reference Router

“…Power consumption measurements were taken using a smart PCI bus extender, a data acquisition unit (DAQ) and associated software. As mentioned in [27,28], the PCI bus extender could precisely measure the real-time power consumption of a PCI-based board. The DAQ is optimized for superior accuracy at fast sampling rates.…”