Optimizing the power-delay product in energy-aware packet forwarding engines

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the possibility of introducing power saving strategies in packet forwarding engines. Such strategies are generally founded on two main kinds of power management capabilities provided by the hardware level, namely, Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and Clock Gating (CG). Our main objective is to trade off power consumption and forwarding performance by acting on the power-delay product. To this purpose, we provide an optimization framework and a speed scaling policy for energy-aware packet forwarding engines. As shown by the results, our speed scaling policy allows saving about 18% of the power consumed by an entire network device without compromising performance during peak hours.