Energy saving local control policy for Green Reconfigurable Routers

Energy efficiency is now a significant concern for network infrastructure and next-generation network devices are expected to embed advanced power management capabilities. However, the effective exploitation of advanced power management capabilities in network devices which adaptively meet network load and operational constraints is still a considerable challenge due to the stochastic properties of the actual traffic load. In this paper, a statistical optimal local control policy for dynamic control of power state configurations according to the actual traffic load is proposed to minimize the power consumption while meeting the performance constraints. The packet-level statistical features of network traffic load is modeled as a first-order Markov chain and the dynamic power state selection problem is formulated as a Markov decision process, which can be solved using dynamic programming. In addition, we discuss the possibility of implementing the proposed scheme in real network devices, and design a case study in an NetFPGA frequency scaled router. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.