Performance Bounds of Rate-Adaptation Schemes for Energy-Efficient Routers
13 June 2010
To maximize the energy efficiency of packet networks, energy use in network equipment should scale rigorously with network traffic load. Rate adaptation is gaining popularity as a promising framework for achieving energy proportionality in the data-path hardware components of network equipment, but a thorough characterization of its energy-saving capabilities is still lacking. We consider rateadaptation schemes that are easy to implement, amenable to incremental deployment in packet switches and routers, and cause controllable degradation of end-to-end packet delays, and derive tight lower and upper bounds on their energy consumption. Our energy bounds indicate that large-scale deployments of rate adaptation can enable substantial energy savings, because large gains are attainable in individual datapath devices under parametric configurations that do not compromise the end-to-end delay performance of the network.
