Ever since the introduction of the microprocessor, computer systems have been getting faster and faster. In approximate accordance with Moore's law (based on Intel® Corporation co-founder Gordon Moore's 1965 publication predicting the number of transistors on integrated circuits to double every two years), the speed increase has shot upward at a fairly even rate for nearly three decades. At the same time, the size of both memory and non-volatile storage has also steadily increased, such that many of today's personal computers are more powerful than supercomputers from just 10-15 years ago. In addition, the speed of network communications has likewise seen astronomical increases.
Increases in processor speeds, memory, storage, and network bandwidth technologies have resulted in the build-out and deployment of networks with ever substantial capacities. More recently, the introduction of cloud-based services, such as those provided by Amazon (e.g., Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3)) and Microsoft (e.g., Azure and Office 365) has resulted in additional network build-out for public network infrastructure, and addition to the deployment of massive data centers to support these services which employ private network infrastructure. Additionally, the new generation (i.e., 4G) of mobile network data services is expected to significantly impact the utilization of land-line networks in the near future. The result of these and other considerations is that the utilization of computer networks is expected to continue to grow at a high rate for the foreseeable future.
Typically, computer network deployments are designed to provide sufficient levels of Quality of Service (QoS) during peak workload conditions and/or over sustained periods of operation. These networks are also designed to be highly reliable, typically with built-in redundancies in both equipment and network links. Moreover, modern network routing schemes have inherent built in redundancies, since packets can typically be routed along many different routes between two network endpoints. This is facilitated via the widespread deployment of numerous network elements comprising switches, routers, and bridges that are configured to dynamically route network traffic via high-bandwidth links between the network elements using well-known protocols such as TCP/IP, UDP, RIP, Ethernet, etc.
The result of network deployments designed for peak workload conditions is that networks may have excess capacities during fairly lengthy timeframes. For example, for a given time-zone, utilization of networks may be dramatically lower during late-night and early-morning hours. This provides an opportunity for power savings, by selectively reducing network capacity while maintaining full routing functionality (meaning a packet can still be routed between any two endpoints via the network or subnet).