Rate Adaptation for Energy Efficiency in Packet Networks

Data networking services and applications enable substantial energy savings in broad sectors of economic activity by substituting the transportation of people and goods with the electronic transfer of data packets. To maximize the efficiency of packet networks as a substitute for less sustainable transport infrastructures, energy use in network equipment should scale rigorously with network traffic load. Rate scaling and sleep-state exploitation are popular methods for enforcing proportionality between energy consumption and network load, but they fail to scale energy consumption over the full load spectrum and their need for tight coordination between adjacent nodes hinders their deployment. We define a novel approach for combining rate scaling and sleep-state exploitation into a single rate-adaptation scheme that preserves the best properties of its components in every portion of the load spectrum. We also introduce a new data-path abstraction that enables the modular deployment of rate-adaptive components, at both node and network levels.