Measurement-based modelling of power consumption at wireless access network gateways

Improving the energy efficiency of the ICT sector is becoming an ambitious challenge for industries and research communities alike. Understanding how the energy is consumed in each part of an ICT system becomes fundamental in order to minimize the overall energy consumed by the system itself. In this paper, we propose an experimentally-driven approach to (i) characterize typical wireless access network gateways from an energy consumption standpoint and (ii) develop simple and accurate power consumption models for such gateways. In this work we focused our attention on the monitoring, measurement and analysis of the energy consumption patterns of WiFi and WiMAX gateways. Our measurements show that the power consumption of such gateways exhibits a linear dependence on the traffic until a saturation point is reached.