Creating power proportional home routers
Network devices tend to be bad at optimizing their power draw based on the experienced load. Swisscom home routers for example are very static in terms of power consumption with less than 0.1 W of a difference between standby and normal operation. They have a almost constant power draw independent of the network traffic seen. This is different from devices that are able to adjust their power draw to the given load which are called power proportional.
One home routers by itself does not draw a lot of power, but there are two aspects that make them have a big impact anyway. Firstly there are millions of them even within switzerland and secondly home routers tend to be close to idle almost all the time. While we have found other home routers that are not as static as the ones Swisscom uses we still would like to better understand what the challenges are with making them more proportional. But even with more power proportional devices available there might still be further optimizations that can be done to reduce the power consumption further.
The project can loosely be split into three parts:
Understanding what kind of hardware is available to build a home router and are there options that already include certain power saving features. Secondly what software components are needed to actually make a home router out of the hardware.
How can the device be optimized to improve power proportionality, is it enough to optimize the software or is there anything else that can be done? How much of it are hardware limitations like missing power saving features vs power not being a high priority? Especially with higher speeds certain network functions might be offloaded to specialized components but should they be used at low load?
How would we design a device if power proportionality is the main objective?
Depending on the type of thesis (bachelor, semester or master) the scope of the project will be adjusted.
Requirements
- Good knowledge about computer networks (communication networks lecture or equivalent)
- Experience with lower level programming like embedded systems is appreciated
- Research project, so the ability to work independently and cricital thinking are important
