Comparing Adaptive Routing and Dynamic Voltage Scaling for Link Power Reduction

We compare techniques that dynamically scale the voltage of individual network links to reduce power consumption with an approach in which all links in the network are set to the same voltage and adaptive routing is used to distribute load across the network. Our results show that adaptive routing with static network link voltages outperforms dimension-order routing with dynamic link voltages in all cases, because the adaptive routing scheme can respond more quickly to changes in network demand. Adaptive routing with static link voltages also outperforms adaptive routing with dynamic link voltages in many cases, although dynamic link voltage scaling gives better behavior as the demand on the network grows.