An Empirical Model of Power Consumption in the NetFPGA Gigabit Router

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.