Toward enterprise virtual power consumption monitoring with Joule

Reliable power consumption metering is important for power consumption management and optimization in wireless access networks. As a matter of fact, it is estimated that by 2015 wireless access networks will account for about 90% of the entire wireless energy cloud footprint. This can be traced back to the massive deployment of WiFi hotspots in the recent years in order to partially offload cellular networks from the load generated by modern data hungry mobile applications. In such a scenario the first step in reducing the power consumption of any IT infrastructure is to acknowledge it. Production-level solutions for large-scale monitoring campaign do exist, in the form, for example, of managed Power Over Ethernet devices. These solutions are however expensive to install and to manage especially for large legacy deployments. To overcome this limitation we propose Joule a virtual power consumption monitoring solution capable of estimating in real-time the actual power consumption of WiFi Access Points. Field trials performed using various benchmarks and applications show that Joule can provide a precise estimation of the power consumed by a typical IEEE 802.11 Access Point.