Deriving a generic energy consumption model for network enabled devices

Energy saving has become a global issue when people use network enabled equipment in the office or at home. However few methods exist to measure and monitor energy use per user or per application, or to control equipment power states. We propose a generic energy consumption model that is based on the power state of network attached equipment, and that supports power management capabilities. This includes measures for each power state (on/off/sleep) and for per bit energy consumption, per interface, per application and at the network QoS (Quality of Services) level. Given the power state of a network device, a network manager could remotely inspect the energy consumption and make changes to the power management setting; for this to happen we introduce a new MIB (Management Information Base) schema to capture the attributes of relevance. Using an agent based modeling framework, we introduce the overall autonomic architecture that makes it possible to minimize energy consumption of network enabled equipment.