Data-Plane Energy Efficiency of a Next-Generation Internet Architecture

In the face of the ever-increasing power consumption of the information and communication technology sector, next-generation Internet architectures offer an opportunity to improve the energy consumption of the Internet. The SCION architecture is unique in that it has reached commercial deployment and thus opens up opportunities for estimating and understanding the promised energy efficiency from a realistic perspective. In this work, we introduce a method that uses the available energy consumption models for the current Internet architecture to estimate the energy efficiency of SCION's data plane. By applying this method to the best available power consumption models of the Internet, we show that while providing advanced security and availability guarantees, SCION can reduce global data plane power consumption by around 700 MW. We further investigate the impact of the SCION's quality of service (QoS) extension on data plane's power consumption and conclude that SCION with its QoS extension can reduce the power consumption of the Internet by up to 2.88 GW. Therefore, SCION, with its QoS extension, reduces the power consumption of the Internet and the whole ICT sector by up to 9.4% and 1.3%, respectively.