Energy‑proportional networking for cloud data centers

Design and validate energy‑proportional networking architectures and control mechanisms for cloud data centers that minimize network energy consumption in proportion to load while maintaining service performance.

Background

The paper notes that, unlike compute servers, most network devices in cloud data centers are not energy‑proportional and are often kept fully active even during low traffic periods. This exacerbates data center energy consumption.

It explicitly identifies the need for approaches that adapt network energy usage to actual traffic volumes as an outstanding issue.