Emulation of burst-based adaptive link rates in NetFPGA towards green networking

Abstract

In recent times, energy consumption in communication media has been increasing drastically. In the literature,energy-saving techniques that enable network devices to enter sleep state or limit the data rate have been proposed toreduce energy costs. In our earlier work, we proposed an energy-saving technique called burst-based adaptive link rate(BBALR), the simulation of which assures increased energy savings. In this paper, we have emulated the hardwareimplementation of BBALR and compared its performance with the outputs of other prominent energy-saving policiesbased on dynamic link rate adaption. The energy savings are mapped from the measured sleep time and reference powervalues. We have used NetFPGA as the testbed, which is a research platform for building real-time network hardwareprototypes.