Promoting Power to a First Class Metric in Network Simulations

Accurate prediction of energy consumption early in the design process is essential to efficiently optimize algorithms and protocols. However, despite energy efficiency gathering significant attention in networking research, limited effort has been invested in providing requisite evaluation tools and models. Hence, developers demand powerful evaluation tools to assist them in comparing new communication paradigms in terms of energy efficiency, and minimizing the energy requirements of algorithms. In this paper, we argue for promoting energy to a first class metric in network simulations. We explore the challenges involved in modelling energy in network simulations and present a detailed analysis of different modelling techniques. Finally, we discuss their applicability in high-level network simulations.