Network Element Characteristics for Traffic Load Adaptive Network Operation

Abstract:
Based on rapidly increasing traffic demands telecommunication networks have developed into consumers of significant amounts of electrical energy. A promising approach for increasing the network energy efficiency is the load-adaptive operation mode which couples the power consumption to the traffic volumes processed – as contrasted with current network operation paradigms and network element capabilities. A key ingredient for such a load-adaptive network operation is the power-capacity characteristic of the network elements. This characteristic is modeled from a theoretical perspective and appropriate simplifications are applied in order to allow a comparison with network element powercapacity models from the literature. A metric for server energy proportionality is adopted from the data center environment for classification of the power proportionality of the telecommunication network elements. For exemplary network equipment measurement results are shown: The measurement results show good agreement with the theoretical modeling approach.