Power measurement of NetFPGA based router

As efforts focus towards meeting the EU 20-20-20 targets, energy efficiency in wired networks is a key component not only because of the impact ICT can make in helping the 20% reduction target in greenhouse gases (e.g. replacing flights with video conferences) but also because of the energy savings that network operators can and need to make in running ICT Networks. Especially, as Internet traffic is growing at a fast rate, designing Next Generation Networks (NGN) to be more energy efficient is increasingly important. Approaches towards making network components less energy consuming include: optimising hardware, the use of smart standby and/or adapting the power consumption (by scaling the clock frequency) in response to the traffic load. This paper examines the possible power savings on the NetFPGA 1G reference router when scaling the frequency of router core logic and SRAMs between 125MHz and 62.5MHz. Power measurements taken with the National Instruments USB-6251 for three different packet sizes, are analysed and discussed.