What is Sleep

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.