A Power Benchmarking Framework for Network Devices Priya Mahadevan, Puneet Sharma, Sujata Banerjee, and Parthasarathy Ranganathan HP Labs 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA {priya.mahadevan,puneet.sharma,sujata.banerjee,partha.ranganathan}@hp.com Abstract. Energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important in the operation of networking infrastructure, especially in enterprise and data center networks. Researchers have proposed several strategies for en- ergy management of networking devices. However, we need a compre- hensive characterization of power consumption by a variety of switches and routers to accurately quantify the savings from the various power savings schemes. In this paper, we first describe the hurdles in network power instrumentation and present a power measurement study of a vari- ety of networking gear such as hubs, edge switches, core switches, routers and wireless access points in both stand-alone mode and a production data center. We build and describe a benchmarking suite that will al- low users to measure and compare the power consumed for a large set of common configurations at any switch or router of their choice. We also propose a network energy proportionality index, which is an easily measurable metric, to compare power consumption behaviors of multiple devices. Keywords: Network energy management, Benchmarking. 1 Introduction Energy efficiency has become crucial for all industries, including the information technology (IT) industry, as there is a strong motivation to lower capital and recurring costs. According to recent literature, the annual electricity consumed by networking devices in the U.S. is 6.06 Terra Watt hours, which translates to around 1 billion US dollars per year [1], thereby presenting a strong case for reducing the energy consumed by networking devices such as hubs, access points, switches and routers. Unlike wireless networks, energy management 1 for networking devices such as hubs, switches and routers in wired networks has not received much attention until very recently. Researchers have proposed several strategies to make routers 1 We use power and energy management interchangeably in this paper. There is a dis- tinction between power management for heat density versus electricity costs; however in this paper, we do not distinguish between these two issues. L. Fratta et al. (Eds.): NETWORKING 2009, LNCS 5550, pp. 795–808, 2009. c  IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009