On the impact of monitoring router energy consumption for greening the Internet

Research in the field of green-networking is raising more and more interest, in particular driven by energy saving purposes. The global Internet and its thousands of equipments consume an enormous energy amount, have an impact on global warming. In addition, nobody has a precise idea about what the Internet - or at least one of its AS (Autonomous System) - consumes. It is obvious designing new routing or management strategies for greening the Internet relies on an initial study of the energy consumption of network equipments at large, and routers on a more focuses way. That is why we study in this paper the power consumption of a router depending on several factors as the traffic rate it has to compute, and its configuration (in particular depending on queue management policy). This work then aims to establish an effective method to measure and analyze the power consumption of a router, as well as to provide data from a real router. This work was motivated by the fact that very little data on the power consumption of network devices is available, despite its huge importance for greening network communication. Based on these first results, a discussion is started on how it would be possible to change routing and management strategies and policies in the Internet for saving energy.