Power consumption analysis of a NetFPGA based router

Abstract

For both economic and environmental reasons, energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important in the design of next generation networks (NGN). The energy efficiency improvements for network components can mainly be achieved by the support of smart standby and/or frequency scaling. This paper describes fine-grained power measurements of the peripheral component interconnect (PCI)-based network field-programmable gate array 1 gigabit (NetFPGA 1G) reference router when scaling the frequency of router core logic and static random access memories (SRAMs) between 125 MHz and 62.5 MHz. This paper presents the power consumption of a NetFPGA 1G reference router under different scenarios. Results show that by reducing the frequency from 125 MHz to 62.5 MHz, under a user datagram protocol (UDP) traffic load of 400 Mbit/s, 12.23% of power can be saved with the same quality of service (QoS), i.e. no packet loss in either case. Moreover, aggregating the traffic and rerouting the packets can save relatively high amount of energy. For example, our results show that 19.77% of power consumption can be saved by aggregating four 100 Mbit/s links into two 200 Mbit/s links.