QUALITY OF SERVICE AWARE RATE THROTTLING OF DELAY TOLERANT TRAFFIC FOR ENERGY EFFICIENT ROUTING

摘要

The invention is directed to energy-efficient network processing of delay tolerant data packet traffic. Embodiments of the invention determine if an aggregate of time critical traffic flow rates and minimum rates for meeting QoS requirements of delay tolerant traffic flows exceeds a combined optimal rate of packet processing engines of a network processor. In the affirmative case, embodiments set the processing rate of individual packet processing engines to a minimum rate, such that the cumulative rate of the packet processing engines meets the aggregate rate, and schedule the delay tolerant flows to meet their respective minimum rates. Advantageously, by throttling the processing rate of only delay tolerant traffic, energy consumption of network processors can be reduced while at the same time QoS requirements of the delay tolerant traffic and time critical traffic can be met.