Design of a Traffic-Aware Governor for Green Routers

Today the reduction of energy consumption in telecommunications networks is one of the main goals to be pursued by manufacturers and researchers. In this context, the paper focuses on routers that achieve energy saving by applying the frequency scaling approach. The target is to propose an analytical model to support designers in choosing the main configuration parameters of the Router Governor in order to meet Quality of Service (QoS) requirements while maximizing energy saving gain. More specifically, the model is used to evaluate the input traffic impacts on the choice of the active router clock frequencies and on the overall green router performance. A case study based on the open NetFPGA reference router is considered to show how the proposed model can be easily applied to a real case scenario.