Power-proportional router: Architectural design and experimental evaluation

High speed routers in Internet are becoming increasingly more powerful, as well as more energy hungry. However, they always show power-inefficient property due to we unilaterally in pursuit of high speed before. In response to this problem, we present a power-efficient router architecture named GreenRouter in this paper. GreenRouter separates a line card into two parts physically: the network interface card (named as DB) and the packet processing card (named as MB), which are interconnected by a two-stage unidirectional switch fabric. Traffic from all the DBs shares all the MBs in GreenRouter, thus the traffic can be aggregated to a few active MBs when traffic is light and the inactive MBs can be shut down to save power. We give the detailed architectural design of GreenRouter. Real-trace driven experiments show that GreenRouter can save about 50% power compared to the conventional router when the average traffic load is 30%, while providing quality of service guarantee at the same time.