Putting the cart before the horse: merging traffic for energy conservation

Reducing energy consumption in the Internet has become an increasingly important goal recently. Previous work on reducing energy consumption has primarily looked at either changing link rates or putting interfaces to sleep. Due to the unpredictable nature of traffic, the energy savings achieved have been modest, do not scale, and incur losses and delay. This article proposes a different approach to the problem, which involves aggregating traffic from multiple input links prior to feeding them to the switch interfaces. The main results we obtain are that energy consumption, measured as fraction of interfaces that are awake, scales linearly with load for all loads and the algorithms are fully deterministic yielding zero packet loss.