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

Improving energy efficiency of Internet equipment is becoming an increasingly important research topic, motivated by the need to reduce energy costs (and Carbon footprint) for Internet Service Providers, as well as increase power density to achieve more switching capacity per-rack. While recent research has profiled the power consumption of commercial routing equipment, these profiles are coarse-grained (i.e., at the granularity of per line-card or per port), and moreover such platforms are inflexible for experimentation with new energy-saving mechanisms. In this paper we therefore consider the NetFPGA platform, which is becoming an increasingly popular routing platform for networking research due to its versatility and low-cost. Using a precise hardware-based traffic generator and high-fidelity energy probe, we conduct several experiments that allow us to decompose the energy consumption of the NetFPGA routing card into fine-grained per-packet and per-byte components with reasonable accuracy. Our quantification of energy consumption on this platform opens the doors for estimating network-wide energy footprints at the granularity of traffic sessions and applications (e.g., due to TCP file transfers), and provides a benchmark against which energy improvements arising from new architectures and protocols can be evaluated.