Green router: Power-efficient router design

Abstract

High speed routers in Internet are becoming more powerful, as well as more energy hungry. In this paper, we present a power-efficient router named Green Router. Packet processing capacities in different line-cards, mainly including IP lookup and forwarding engines, are shared and modulated according to traffic loads. Unoccupied capacities are powered off in order to save power. Green Router separates a line-card into two parts: network interface card (DB) and packet processing card (MB), connected by a two-stage switch fabric. Traffic from all the DBs shares all the MBs in Green Router, thus can be aggregated to a few active MBs on demand and other inactive MBs can be shutdown to save power. We give Green Router’s architectural design and propose a flow-slice-based dynamic allocation policy. Real-trace-driven experiments show that Green Router can save significant power and the impact of QoS is small.