Modeling Data-Plane Power Consumption of Future Internet Architectures

Abstract

With current efforts to design Future Internet Architectures (FIAs), the evaluation and comparison of different proposals is an interesting research challenge. Previously, metrics such as bandwidth or latency have commonly been used to compare FIAs to IP networks. We suggest the use of power consumption as a metric to compare FIAs. While low power consumption is an important goal in its own right (as lower energy use translates to smaller environmental impact as well as lower operating costs), power consumption can also serve as a proxy for other metrics such as bandwidth and processor load. Lacking power consumption statistics about either commodity FIA routers or widely deployed FIA testbeds, we propose models for power consumption of FIA routers. Based on our models, we simulate scenarios for measuring power consumption of content delivery in different FIAs. Specifically, we address two questions: 1) which of the proposed FIA candidates achieves the lowest energy footprint; and 2) which set of design choices yields a power-efficient network architecture? Although the lack of real-world data makes numerous assumptions necessary for our analysis, we explore the uncertainty of our calculations through sensitivity analysis of input parameters.