Somniloquy: Augmenting Network Interfaces to Reduce PC Energy Usage

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Reducing the energy consumption of PCs is becoming increasingly important with rising energy costs and environmental concerns. Sleep states such as S3 (suspend to RAM) save energy, but sometimes they cannot be used because they prevent PCs from performing networking tasks, such as accepting remote desktop logins or performing background file transfers. In this paper, we present Somniloquy, an architecture that augments network interfaces to allow PCs in S3 to be responsive to network traffic. We show that many applications can be supported without application-specific code in the augmented network interface by using application-level wakeup triggers, e.g. for remote desktop and VoIP. A further class of applications can be supported with modest processing and memory resources in the network interface, including instant messaging presence and peer-to-peer file sharing. Our prototype implementation of Somniloquy using a USB peripheral shows significant energy saving potential in experiments, with 11x to 24x less power draw in several scenarios, which in turn translates to significant cost savings for PC users.

Maintained By : Yuvraj Agarwal                                                                                                                                Last Edited:    June 15, 2010