The impact of networking algorithms on the power consumption of routers

In the push towards greener ICT, there is a need to examine the energy savings possible in the design of network infrastructure and each network component. The focus of this paper is to evaluate the impact of routing algorithms on the power consumption of network routers. In a comparison of the power consumption of a number of routers implementing different routing protocols on the open source NetFPGA board, our results show the Bloom filter-based zFilter forwarding node is the greenest router. The rate control protocol (RCP) router and the precision time protocol (PTP) router consume almost identical power, which is about 1.1-1.6% higher than that of the reference router. This higher power consumption of RCP and PTP routers is attributed to the 3.6%-4.7% higher power consumption in the 3.3-V power component of the total power consumption, which is due to the higher router design complexity. Furthermore, we examined the impact of scaling down the core operational clock frequency to demonstrate the merits of energy proportional routing in each of the routers. The zFilter, operating at 62.5 MHz, outperforms the RCP, PTP, and the reference routers operating at 125 MHz, in terms of both packet loss and throughput. In addition, the zFilter operating at 62.5 MHz consumes around 10.9-11.2% less power than the reference router operating at 125 MHz. We analyze the architecture of each router to further explain these results.