Greening of the Internet

Maruti Gupta, Suresh Singh

SIGCOMM’03

Son
Nov 06th, 2003
Index

 Introduction
 Possible Approaches
 Conclusion
Introduction
 Energy consumption of the Internet is “too high”
 Data collection in the US year 2000 (T
W-h: Tera-watt hours)

Device Approximate number Total energy

deployed consumption
Hubs 93.5 millions 1.6 TW-h
LAN Switch 95,000 3.2 TW-h
Wan Switch 50,000 0.15 TW-h
Router 3,257 1.1 TW-h
Total 6.05 TW-h
Why should we care?

 Three main reasons:

 Current Energy Inefficiencies
 Enable Greater Deployment
 Benefits in the Event of a a Disaster
Current Energy Inefficiencies

 Ideal cost of wireless communication: 2-3

times more efficient than wired network
 Networking devices expend much energy
when idle
 Networking devices cannot turn into energ
y saving modes (monitor, hdd…)
 Cost: 1 billion $  increasing rapidly
Enable Greater Deployment

 Energy (electricity) is a scarce resource

 If energy consumption is reduced  able
to deploy more devices with same cost
 Significant fraction of total consumption
Benefits in Disasters

 Networking equipments rely on batteries

during disasters
 Low power for operating modes  last
longer
Possible Approaches

 How the Internet architectures and

protocols can be modified
 Possibilities:
 Switch/Router: sleep mode (subcomponents)
 Network level: changing routes during low
activity periods  need appropriate solutions
 Modify Internet topology that allow route
adaptation
 “SLEEPING”: appropriate way
Energy saving opportunities

 Switch/Router: memory, line cards, main

processors
 Memory: most memory today support energy
saving modes
 Line cards: significant loss and latency 
coordinated / uncoordinated sleep
 Main processors: clock lower, but WHEN ?
 At least result in end-to-end delay
How and When

 How long to sleep?

 Sleep time>wake up time
 Depends on protocols
 Decision to go to sleep?
 Monitor traffic on all interfaces
 Estimate Traffic flow
 Which one?
 Isolated ASes
 Almost every routers / switches
Impact on Internet protocols

 Many protocols work

 Serious side-effects
 Impacts on Switches
 Impacts on Routers
Impacts on Switches

 Use forwarding tables, spanning tree proto

col (VLANs)
 Maintain MAC address on each interface
 Recomputation takes times
Impact on Routers

 Uncoordinated sleeping: no effect on

routing protocols
 Coordinated sleeping: requires significant
modifications
 Identify the minimum number of links to
guarantee QOS
 Recovering from sleeping
 Hello messages to only awake interface
Conclusion

 Efficiency: up to 90%
 Sleeping is a indeed feasible strategy
 Requires some changes to current
protocols, Internet architecture, hardware