Traffic Dispatch Policy in a Power-Aware Router

In this paper, we present a new traffic dispatch policy for a power-aware router, which was named GreenRouter and was proposed in our previous publication [. Packet processing capacities, mainly including IP lookup and forwarding engines, are shared and modulated according to traffic loads, unoccupied capacities are powered off in order to save power. A flow based traffic dispatch policy was proposed to allocate traffic from network interfaces to processing engines dynamically. Significant power saving has been achieved while QoS constrains have been satisfied. We present a new packet-based dispatch policy for GreenRouter in this paper, which can achieve more power saving. Reordering is adopted to avoid out-of-order delivery.