Evaluating the energy-awareness of future Internet devices

Advanced power management capabilities have been proposed to be included into next-generation green network devices in order to modulate their energy requirements according to the workload. The clear side effect of enabling these new capabilities consists in a performance level reduction of network devices. Starting from some existing benchmarking standards for evaluating energy-efficiency, namely ECR and ATIS-060015, this contribution is devoted to determining a set of parameters, and methodologies that can be applied to correctly and precisely evaluate the tradeoff between energy consumption and network performance. Some experimental results obtained with the proposed indexes and methodologies, as well as a green SW router prototype have been provided.