Active window management: Reducing energy consumption of TCP congestion control

In the last few years, the ever increasing attention to the eco-sustainability of Internet has pointed out the need of providing advanced power management schemes in network devices, in order to be able to reduce energy consumption according to the traffic load. In this context, starting from the observation that most of the traffic of today´s Internet is carried by TCP, we focused on the impact that the dynamics of the TCP congestion control may have on energy efficiency of end hosts. In this paper we demonstrate that great energy consumption is related to network congestion conditions. Moreover, we propose to use a technique, called Active Window Management (AWM), with the aim of driving TCP sending rate according to the network available bandwidth, so improving congestion control and providing high TCP performance. AWM requires no changes to any TCP version. We demonstrate that the TCP traffic shaping performed by AWM allows a great reduction of the energy consumption in end hosts, with respect to the case where only TCP is used as congestion control.