Multi-level power and performance tradeoffs across the access networks to customer premises equipment

Across broadband access networks, significant opportunities to minimise energy consumption exist at the application and networks level but are not fully coordinated. For example, an application can tune its QoS in accordance with the available power levels of network systems. As a first step towards enabling energy efficiency, we study the inter-relationship between energy consumption and application performance in a residential home-gateway. The study reveals the power and application performance trade-offs in broadband access networks and then employs an agent based approach that works together in accordance with a flexible set of power-performance objectives and determines the existence of a feasible coordinated operating point. The key elements of our approach include (a) a power-performance polygon-based methodology which automatically selects power management settings that keep the pathway from access network to home-gateway operating close to the optimal operating point (b) a multi-agent policy-based approach which adaptively manages performance and power consumption based on varying traffic load during peak/off-peak hours. Finally, the efficiency of the model is demonstrated by the initial results of the experiments.