Energy-Efficient Parallel Packet Forwarding

As the Internet traffic continues growing rapidly, parallel packet forwarding becomes a necessity in Internet infrastructure to meet the throughput requirement. On the other hand, energy/ power consumption has been a critical challenge for Internet infrastructure. It has been shown that two thirds of power dissipation inside a core router is due to packet forwarding. This chapter studies the problem of energy-efficient parallel packet forwarding in Internet Infrastructure. According to whether the data structure is shared or duplicated among multiple engines, two types of parallel packet forwarding systems are discussed. For the system with shared data structure, we study how to partition the data structure and map onto multiple engines, so that the worst-case energy/ power consumption is minimized. For the system with duplicated data structure, we formulate as an optimization problem how to distribute traffic load onto multiple engines to minimize the overall power consumption while satisfying the throughput demand.