Power measurement campaign for evaluating the energy efficiency of current NICs

Recently, the power consumption of the home/access networks has stimulated several research efforts devoted to the study of new mechanisms to optimize the energy utilization. In particular, most of these works is based on the idea that Ethernet links are mostly underutilized, and is thus aimed at realizing mechanisms able to adapt device consumption to the link utilization. Given the few works presenting an experimental study of the current Ethernet network devices from an energy point of view, this paper aims at presenting an extensive measurements campaign for evaluating the power consumption of two COTS Ethernet NICs. The measurements campaign, carried out following the procedures provided by the ECR Initiative™ and the SNE Energy Star, shows the energy inefficiency of the current NICs. Finally, using the experimental results, the paper presents a qualitative estimation of the energy savings achievable by implementing a well-known energy savings mechanism (i.e., ALR) in the Ethernet NICs.