PROGRES: A Programmable Green Router with Controlled Service Rate

Routers are the most common transmission devices over the Internet. Architecture of the routers can be improved to fully utilize the chances to save energy related to the CMOS based transmission equipment. One prime approach for controlling and managing the power dissipation of the CMOS devices is Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS). This paper implements the DVFS in a CMOS device programmed as a router for studying multiple factors impeding energy saving by using Dynamic Clock Generation (DCG) and Dynamic Clock Selection (DCS). The authors emphasize on the performance evaluation of such frequency scaled CMOS devices, in which the service rate vary according to the state of an underlying finite-state, continuous-time Markov model. Furthermore, this paper establishes the relationships of critical factors (in/)directly effecting power consumption of these devices. Aforementioned factors and their dependencies such as the arrival and service rates, queuing lengths and thresholds in such systems facilitate the changing dynamics of functions and services for appropriate clock state of the device. Thus, the resulting model is quite complex to be proved analytically or numerically. We investigate and implement PROGRES to affirm the numerical models' accuracy for capturing the service rate transitions of the proposed control policies with detailed performance analysis and discussion. Furthermore, PROGRES also scales the arrival rates and queue lengths, while ensuring the controlled transition rates of the modulating Markov process in the programmable router. Two control models against single service rate for benchmarking. These techniques and numerical experiments allow us to identify and evaluate the trade-offs between energy consumption and system performance in the futuristic programmable networking devices with resulting approximations are promising at network, node and functional levels.