GreenRouter: Reducing Power by Innovating Router´s Architecture

High speed routers in Internet are becoming more powerful, as well as more energy hungry. In this paper, we present a new architecture of router named GreenRouter which separates a line-card into two parts: network interface card (DB) and packet processing card (MB), connected by a two-stage switch fabric in traffic flows´ ingress and egress direction respectively. Traffic from all DBs shares all the MBs in GreenRouter, thus can be aggregated to a few active MBs on demand and other MBs can be shut down to save power. Several key issues to this new architecture are addressed. We evaluate the power saving efficiency and give preliminary simulation results. GreenRouter can well adapt the traffic fluctuation and real trace evaluations over one week shows that up to 63.7% power saving can be achieved while QoS constraints are guaranteed.