Designing optimal energy profiles for network hardware

The energy management of computer hardware mainly relies on primitives defined in the ACPI industrial standard. Network devices can borrow the same concepts as a basis for their energy-efficient design; however, to effectively tailor network processors for their specific applications, the set of energy-aware states defined by the ACPI and their parameters should be carefully chosen. In particular when designing network hardware, one should address the problem of optimizing parameter values (most often chosen in a discrete set) to trade-off energy efficiency and network performance. In this paper, we provide a methodology for such choice, by investigating this trade-off over a continuous spectrum of parameter values. This approach will allow us to gain insight in the behavior of the optimal solutions that achieve different desired tradeoffs.