Sleepy Network Devices: Implementation and Energy Modeling of Low-Power Proxying Solutions

Kristian Ahrendtsen Blom () and Oscar Cederberg ()

Description

With the high energy prices of today and the challenges of climate change, saving energy is more important than ever. This master's thesis is about saving energy in a system of network connected cameras, where not all cameras are needed all the time. The work includes some practical parts, such as prototyping methods of saving energy, and some more theoretical parts, such as building and evaluating energy models of the developed method. There are different use cases for having a system of cameras that are not always active. For example, to check the weather conditions on a road, or to check for wildfires in a forest. Even though the cameras do not always capture video, they need to be reachable for maintenance, such as firmware upgrades or adjusting device settings. If, for example, a camera is turned off, it cannot respond to any requests. There are different ways of saving energy in this setting. One idea is to have a low power proxy device that can act as a proxy for the camera and control the power to the camera. Another idea is to keep all cameras on, but in a sleep mode and activate with a Wake-on-LAN magic packet. Different solutions have different trade-offs in terms of energy consumption and wake up time. The first part of the work is to prototype a few different methods of saving energy. The second part is to model the energy consumption of each method in a way that is applicable to new use cases. The third part is to evaluate the precision of the models by comparing them to actual energy measurements.