Dynamic frequency scaling architecture for energy efficient router

Recently, energy expenditures of the Internet have increased dramatically, raising energy issue of routers an urgent problem in relative research areas. In fact, much device surplus and redundancy are introduced during network planning for rarely appeared traffic peak hours and device failures, wasting energy most of the time. In this work, an energy-aware architecture is proposed for routers, which could trade system performance for energy savings while traffic is low by scaling frequencies of its inner components. We also explore multi-frequency modulation strategies to optimize the energy saving effect. The result shows that our prototype router could save about 40% of its peak power consumption.