Modeling Energy Consumption in High-Capacity Routers and Switches

Routers and switches are major contributors to the energy consumption of modern networks. Today, many energy efficiency metrics for these high-capacity devices are coarse-grained, i.e., based upon a single energy per bit value given at peak load or averaged over several specific loads. In this paper, we develop a new power model and a vendor-agnostic methodology that permits quantifying the energy efficiency of Internet equipment at a more fundamental level, i.e., at the granularity of per-packet processing, and per-byte store and forward packet handling operations. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique by applying it to various types of routers and switches. We describe how our technique can be used to accurately estimate the network-wide energy footprint incurred when accessing different applications. We offer our method as a valuable framework against which the energy efficiency of current and future generation of load-proportional Internet equipment can be benchmarked.