Network energy reduction via an adaptive shutdown algorithm

Energy efficiency has become crucial for the IT industry as evident by the exponential growth of the annual electricity consumption by networking devices which is estimated to be around one billion US dollars per year. This fact presents a strong case for reducing the energy consumed by networking devices such as hubs, access points, switches and routers. This paper rigorously analyses the power consumption of network links and proposes new techniques that can reduce the power consumption in modern computer networks using a new Adaptive Shutdown Rate (ASR) algorithm. Our results show significant improvements over existing techniques used for energy savings in computer networks. Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015