Energy Consumption of Residential and Professional Switches

Precise evaluation of network appliance energy consumption is necessary to accurately model or simulate the power consumption of distributed systems. In this paper we evaluate the influence of traffic onto the consumption of electrical power of four switches found in home and professional environments. First we describe our measurement and data analysis approach, and how our results can be used for estimating the power consumption when knowing the average traffic bandwidth.Then we present the measurement results of two residential switches, and two professional switches. For each type we present regression models and parameters describing their quality. Similar to other works we find that for one of the switches the power consumption actually drops for high traffic loads, while for the others the situation is reverse. Measures justify that during most energy consumption evaluation, network appliance energy cost can be approximated as constant. This work gives information on the possible changes of this cost.