Evaluating protocol energy use and efficiency through profiling of computational operations

With the exponential growth of internet communications and the rise to prominence of environmental concerns, the energy consumption of the Information Communications Technology industry has become an issue of major importance. One area that has not been yet fully explored is the evaluation of the computational loads required in the processing and forwarding of traffic. While significant work has been performed towards optimizations especially of wireless protocols for energy efficiency "outside the devices" through energy-optimizing mechanisms that deal with the characteristics of the transmission medium, the computational loads required by the protocols' operations and mechanisms themselves "within the devices" have not been yet investigated adequately. Towards this end, in this paper we put forward a method suitable for the measurement and profiling of the processing requirements of the operations, as well as for the traffic loads, generated by both wired and wireless protocols. As we show, this method can be used to determine specific operations, functionality sets and configurations that increase the protocols' and the resulting overall network energy use. It can be used, therefore, to derive recommendations for further protocol optimizations towards energy efficiency as well as practical rules for the selection of specific protocols depending on the higher level applications and the specific deployment environment under which they operate.