Algorithms for Reducing the Total Power Consumption in Data Communication-Based Applications

It is now critical to reduce the consumption of natural resources, especially petroleum. Even in information systems, we have to reduce the total electrical power consumption. We classify network applications to two types of applications, transaction and communication based ones. In this paper, we consider communication based applications like the file transfer protocol (FTP). A computer named server consumes the electric power to transfer a file to a client depending on the transmission rate. We discuss a model for power consumption of a data transfer application which depends on the total transmission rate and number of clients to which the server concurrently transmits files. A client has to find a server in a set of servers, each of which holds a file so that the power consumption of the server is reduced. We discuss a pair of algorithms PCB (power consumption-based) and TRB (transmission rate-based) to find a server which transmits a file to a client. In the evaluation, we show the total power consumption can be reduced by the algorithms compared with the traditional round-robin algorithm.