Fantastic Joules and Where to Find Them. Modeling and Optimizing Router Energy Demand

Authors: Romain Jacob, Lukas Röllin, Jackie Lim, Jonathan Chung, Maurice Béhanzin, Weiran Wang, Andreas Hunziker, Theodor Moroianu, Seyedali Tabaeiaghdaei, Adrian Perrig, and Laurent Vanbever
IMC '25: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Internet Measurement Conference
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Abstract

Reducing our society’s energy demand is critical to address the sustainability challenge. While the Internet currently accounts for 1—1.5% of global electricity consumption and continues to grow, the energy demands of one of its core components—routers—remain poorly understood. The available power data is limited and not fined-grained enough, offering little actionable insight into strategies for effectively reducing the Internet’s energy consumption. To address this, we assemble and present a unique dataset including datasheet information, router-internal measurements, external power measurements, and router power models. This dataset depicts a clearer picture of routers energy demand and provides insights on how to reduce it. The dataset suggests, e.g., that (i) datasheets are not useful predictors, sometimes even incorrect; (ii) internal router power measurements have limited accuracy; (iii) using more efficient and better-sized power supply units is a promising energy-saving vector; (iv) turning links off is less efficient than anticipated in the literature. This work also highlights the limitations of today’s power monitoring practices and provides suggestions for improvement.

Research Area: Sustainable Networking

People

Lukas Röllin
PhD student
Weiran Wang
Researcher

Talk

BibTex

@inproceedings{jacob2025fantastic,
  author    = {Jacob, Romain and R{\"{o}}llin, Lukas and Lim, Jackie and Chung, Jonathan and B{\'{e}}hanzin, Maurice and Wang, Weiran and Hunziker, Andreas and Moroianu, Theodor and Tabaeiaghdaei, Seyedali and Perrig, Adrian and Vanbever, Laurent},
  title     = {{Fantastic Joules and Where to Find Them. Modeling and Optimizing Router Energy Demand}},
  booktitle = {IMC '25: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Internet Measurement Conference},
  address   = {Madison, WI, USA},
  year      = 2025,
  month     = oct,
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  doi       = {10.1145/3730567.3732920},
  url       = {https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/728960/3730567.3732920.pdf}
}

Research Collection: 20.500.11850/728960

Slide Sources: https://gitlab.ethz.ch/projects/59784