Experience with Monitoring Electrical Power Consumed by Routers

Research in the field of green-networking is raising more and more interest, in particular driven by energy saving purposes. Recent research dealt on one hand to design new mechanisms to reduce the energy consumed in a network device and a second to establish protocols which take into account the energy profile of the material. We believe that the success of such protocol design relies on an initial study of the energy consumption of network equipments at large, and routers on a more focuses way. That is why we study in this paper the power consumption of a router depending on several factors as the traffic rate it has to compute, and its configuration (in particular depending on queue management policy). This work then aims to establish an effective method to measure and analyze the power consumption of a router, as well as to provide data from a real router. This work was motivated by the fact that very little data on the power consumption of network devices is available, despite its huge importance for greening network communication