A new power profiling method and power scaling mechanism for energy-aware NetFPGA gigabit router

Today the ICT industry accounts for 2–4% of the worldwide carbon emissions that are estimated to double in a business-as-usual scenario by 2020. A remarkable part of the large energy volume consumed in the Internet today is due to the over-provisioning of network resources such as routers, switches and links to meet the stringent requirements on reliability. Therefore, performance and energy issues are important factors in designing gigabit routers for future networks. However, the design and prototyping of energy-efficient routers is challenging because of multiple reasons, such as the lack of power measurements from live networks and a good understanding of how the energy consumption varies under different traffic loads and switch/router configuration settings. Moreover, the exact energy saving level gained by adopting different energy-efficient techniques in different hardware prototypes is often poorly known. In this article, we first propose a measurement framework that is able to quantify and profile the detailed energy consumption of sub-components in the NetFPGA OpenFlow switch. We then propose a new power-scaling algorithm that can adapt the operational clock frequencies as well as the corresponding energy consumption of the FPGA core and the Ethernet ports to the actual traffic load. We propose a new energy profiling method, which allows studying the detailed power performance of network devices. Results show that our energy efficient solution obtains higher level of energy efficiency compared to some existing approaches as the upper and lower bounds of power consumption of the NetFPGA Openflow switch are proved to be 30% lower than ones of the commercial HP Enterprise switch. Moreover, the new switch architecture can save up to 97% of dynamic power consumption of the FPGA chip at lowest frequency mode.