Energy Audit: Monitoring power consumption in diverse network environments

Understanding the details of power consumption in networks is a precursor to being able to make effective power management decisions. However, measuring the power consumption is often fraught with difficulty due in part to large and dispersed deployment of heterogeneous equipment. In this paper we present a tool suite called EnergyAudit that is designed for network operators to audit the power consumption in their infrastructure. The tool suite has three components, (i) an API that links to existing management infrastructures and enables devices to be queried, (ii) a database of benchmark measurements of networking equipment that maps device configurations and operating status to power consumption, (iii) an auditing tool that queries the community database. The API simplifies deployment of EnergyAudit. The database enables community and manufacturer contribution of power consumption estimates. The auditing tool can infer missing data and reports both the estimated power consumption for devices in the network and the fidelity of the measurements from which the device-to-power mapping was reported. We describe the details of the tool suite and demonstrate its use in three different network environments with diverse systems.