Comparative study of power consumption of a NetFPGA-based forwarding node in publish–subscribe Internet routing

Making the Internet more energy efficient is one of the objectives of future Internet research because of the rising energy cost and environmental concerns. As most Internet users are only interested in accessing information and not the physical location of it, there is also active research on evolving the current host-centric network architecture to an information-centric network (ICN) architecture, which also promises better support for security and mobility. This paper focuses on examining the power consumption of a routing node in ICN. It is experimentally demonstrated that the Bloom filter based forwarding node in ICN is more energy efficient than the longest prefix match based forwarding in the current host-centric network. The experiments were conducted on a Bloom filter (zFilter) forwarding node implemented on the open-source NetFPGA platform. The results in the paper show that using identical operation frequency and packet size of 60 bytes, the zFilter consumes less power than the IPv4 reference router by up to 3.5%. By reducing the operational core frequency, the zFilter at 62.5 MHz can reduce the total power by 9.9–13.8% and FPGA power by 17.8–26.1% compared to the reference router at 125 MHz, while still outperforming the reference router in terms of the packet loss and throughput. In addition, per packet energy consumption is evaluated for the zFilter and it is shown that the zFilter lowers the per packet energy consumption by up to 41.6% when compared with the IPv4 reference router.