Abstract
Energy consumption of networking infrastructures is growing fast due to the exponential growth of data traffic and the deployment of increasingly powerful equipment. Besides operational costs and environmental impacts, the ever-increasing energy consumption has become a limiting factor to long-term growth of network infrastructures. Operators, vendors and researchers have started to look beyond a single router or line card for network-wide solutions towards energy proportionality. Therefore, Power Aware Networking (PANET) has been proposed to improve network energy efficiency. A PANET-enabled network assumes that only a subset of devices will be involved in traffic forwarding when the network is lightly loaded, so as to improve global energy savings. PANET is introduced in this chapter. Promising solutions for PANET are also exposed. PANET features are also analyzed. The chapter also discusses the challenges and future work that needs to be done.
Top2. Use Cases
This section investigates PANET use cases which cover both backbone and data center networks. As for the energy efficiency of backbone networks, only intra-domain use cases are considered. Trying to be energy efficient at the inter-domain scale seems technically feasible, but it can easily end up with lack of business motivation. Inter-domain use cases are left for future study.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Sleep: A state of the network devices. When a network device enters the sleep mode, it consumes less power, transports no traffic while preserves state information in the memory or somewhere.
Software Define Network: The network architecture to allow network administrator to manage the network on a central controller. This controller acts as an oracle which has the full knowledge of the network state.
Network Topology: The mathematical arrangement of the various links and nodes of a network.
Quality of Service (QoS): It is the idea that transmission rates, error rates, and other characteristics can be measured, improved, and, to some extent, guaranteed in advance.
Data Center Network: The part of network infrastructure that are used to connect a large amount of servers in a data center of an enterprise, Internet Service Provider, etc.
Traffic Matrix: A mathematical matrix giving the traffic volumes for a certain time interval between origin and destination in a network.
Traffic Engineering: Telecommunication network engineers or programs use the knowledge of statistics including the nature of traffic, measurements and simulations to make predictions and to plan telecommunication networks.