Arun Vishwanath
ABSTRACT
Reducing the power consumption of core Internet routers is important for both Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and router vendors. ISPs can reduce their Carbon footprint and operational costs, while router manufacturers can achieve higher switching capacity per rack space. In this work, we examine the impact of packet buffers on the power consumption of backbone router line-cards. We argue that Gigabytes of always-on SRAM and DRAM buffers account for around 10% of the power, but are actively used only during transient periods of congestion. We propose a simple and practical algorithm for activating buffers incrementally as needed and putting them to sleep when not in use. We evaluate our algorithm on traffic traces from carrier and enterprise networks, via simulations in ns2, and by implementing it on a programmable-router test-bed. Our study shows that much of the energy associated with off-chip packet buffers can be eliminated with negligible impact on traffic performance. Dynamic adjustment of active router buffer size provides a low-complexity low-risk mechanism of saving energy that is amenable for incremental deployment in networks today.
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