Achieving energy savings and QoS in internet access routers
Alfio Lombardo, Carla Panarello, Giovanni Schembra · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 2011
In order to provide high quality communications over a best-effort network, an alternative to complex QoS control procedures is represented by generously over-provisioning the network resources. This approach has guaranteed in the near past reasonably performance for many applications, but it implies a waste of energy that today is unsustainable. This paper proposes an autonomous measurement mechanism, named G-Router, to allow an access node in the Internet to align its power consumption to either the maximum capacity the user traffic requires, or the minimum available capacity in the network path between source and destination. Simulation results show that allowing access network nodes to adapt the switching and transmission resources to the minimum between the above values, the G-Router guarantees the maximum QoS while minimizing the energy consumption.