Rahil Gandotra and Levi Perigo, University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Energy consumption by the network infrastructure is growing expeditiously with the rise of the Internet. Critical research efforts have been pursued by academia, industry and governments to make networks, such as the Internet, operate more energy efficiently and reduce their power consumption. This work presents an in-depth survey of the approaches to reduce energy consumption in wired networks by first categorizing existing research into broad categories and then presenting the specific techniques, research challenges, and important conclusions. At abroad level, we present five categories of approaches for energy efficiency in wired networks – (i) sleeping of network elements, (ii) link rate adaptation, (iii) proxying, (iv) store and forward, and (v) network traffic aggregation. Additionally, this survey reviews work in energy modeling and measurement, energy-related standards and metrics, and enumerates discussion points for future work and motivations.

Energy efficiency, energy proportionality, energy-aware protocols, wired networks.