Performance and power consumption modeling for green COTS Software Router

We consider a new generation of COTS software routers (SRs), able to effectively exploit multi-core/CPU HW platforms. Our main objective is to analyze, to evaluate and to model the impact of power saving mechanisms, generally included in today´s COTS processors, on the SR behavior and networking performance. To this purpose, we tried to understand and to separately characterize the roles of both HW and SW layers through a large set of internal and external experimental measures, obtained with a heterogeneous set of HW platforms and SR setups. Moreover, starting from this detailed measure analysis, we propose a simple model, able to represent the SR performance with a high accuracy level in terms of packet throughput and related power consumption. The proposed model can be effectively applied inside ldquogreen optimizationrdquo mechanisms to minimize power consumption, while maintaining a certain SR performance target.