Power control and management in the NetFPGA gigabit router

Improving energy efficiency in Internet equipments is becoming an increasingly important research topic. In this paper, we discuss the lesson gained by experimenting a power management mechanism aimed at reducing the power consumption while guaranteeing the Quality of Service (QoS). To this purpose, we drive the clock frequency of an open flexible and high-performance router, the NetFPGA, according to the measured input bit rate. An evaluation of the proposed power management policy is provided.