Computer Science textbooks rarely take power consumption into account and the Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols, and Practice ebook is no exception. This is slowly changing as energy consumption is being more and more important in many deployments, even in fixed networks where this was not the case in the past.

Unfortunately, there are few sources of information about the power consumption of deployed routers and switches. Three blog posts from two different vendors provide an interesting insight on how routers and switches consume energy and which components consume most of the energy. This is with this type of information that network operators and researchers will be able to minimize the energy consumed by their networks.

• Optimizing Power Consumption in High End Routers
• High bandwidth router power consumption
• Cisco 8800 power provisioning