A Sensor-based Power Management System for

Sustainable Computing in Large Environments

Simone Brienza Giuseppe Anastasi
Dept. of Information Engineering Dept. of Information Engineering
University of Pisa University of Pisa
Pisa, Italy Pisa, Italy
E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract— A considerable fraction of the total energy

consumed by the Internet is due to an inefficient utilization of
computing equipment in homes and offices, such as Personal
Computers (PCs), printers, and IP phones. PCs are often left on
even when they are not used, while printers and IP phones are
typically kept always on, especially in offices. Significant energy
and economic savings could, thus, be achieved through a more
intelligent utilization of computing equipment, especially in large
organizations. In this paper we propose an automated power-
management system for large environments, that suspends PCs
when they are not in use and re-activate them as soon as the user
is supposed to use them again. The proposed solution leverages
different sensors for presence detection that are already in the Figure 1 - PC utilization patterns.
environment and, thus, do not introduce any additional cost.
when necessary. The other two users regularly switch off their
Keywords—Power Management, Large Computing PC when they leave their office. In addition, the user of PC2
Environments, Wake-on-LAN, Low intrusiveness. typically switches it off also during lunch time. However, in
both cases the PC remains active almost continuously during
I. INTRODUCTION the day.
Our experimental results confirm that significant energy
Recent studies [1] have shown that a large fraction of the (and economic) savings could be achieved through appropriate
total energy consumed by the Internet is due to computing power management strategies. However, it is not reasonable to
equipment in homes and offices, such as Personal Computers rely only on the user cooperation, especially in large
(PCs), printers, displays, and IP phones. PCs are often powered organizations. Hence, automated power management systems
on even when they are not used, while other user equipment are required that allow to switch off PCs when they are not
(e.g., printers and IP phones) are typically kept always on, used, with minimum (or no) user involvement. A number of
especially in public offices. While the power consumption of a such solutions are already available and are briefly discussed
single equipment is limited (e.g., 100 W for a desktop PC), the below.
total consumed energy may be remarkable, especially in Polisave [2] is a client-server system that allows users to
organizations with a large number of users. A large fraction of schedule specific actions for automated power management of
this energy could be saved through appropriate power networked PCs. For each controlled PC, it allows to specify the
management strategies. However, users generally do not pay so exact time when the PC should be switched off and on (e.g.,
much attention to the energy problem and, so, they typically do when the user typically enters and exits her/his office). The
not enable power management strategies on their PC (e.g., controlled PC (client) periodically queries the power manager
automatic hibernation after an idle period). (server) to check for possible actions scheduled for it. If a
To investigate the PC utilization pattern in working places shutdown or hibernation is planned at that time, the PC
we monitored, for a period of 8 weeks, the status of networked immediately turns off. On the other side, if a wakeup is
PCs in our university campus. To this end, we used an scheduled for a PC, the server sends a Magic Packet [3] to it.
approach similar to that described in [2]. We found that a very Polisave allows to define static rules, i.e., the user must specify
large number of PCs are never turned off by their users. In in advance the exact time when the PC must be switched
addition, almost all PCs remain continuously active during the on/off. Of course, this is very difficult to predict with good
working time, even if their users are involved in a meeting or accuracy. Polisave can (partially) eliminate energy wastes that
class. Figure 1 shows three typical utilization patterns. The first occurs during nights or week-ends. However, it has no effect
user (PC1) never switches her/his PC off because she/he wants on energy wastes due to idle periods during the working time,
to be able to access it from a remote location (e.g., from home), e.g., when the user is attending a meeting or teaching a class.
Work carried out in the framework of the SmartBuildings project funded
by the Regional Government of Sicily (POR FESR Sicilia 2007-2013).
978-3-901882-56-2@IFIP,2013

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To this purpose, all modern operating systems allow the user to • User Presence Detection. Presence detectors allow to
enable automated power management (e.g., hibernating the PC suspend/power off the PC also during idle periods that
after a pre-defined idle period). However users typically do not occur sporadically (e.g., due a meeting or class) and,
enable such mechanism, in order to avoid its negative side hence, cannot be predicted in advance and reflected into
effects. the system through specific control rules. Information
In this perspective Gicomp [4] allows to automatically provided by presence detectors is used by the system to
install/modify power management policies on PCs in large determine if the user is within the working area, or not.
computing environments. Policies are decided by the Whenever the system detects that the user is away from
organization management and installed by the network her/his working area, it sends a shutdown (or
administrator through the system (i.e., without any user suspension) command to the PC. Conversely, as soon as
intervention). Specifically, Gicomp allows to define the time to the system detects the user presence nearby the working
dim and turn off the display, the disk spin down timeout, the area, it sends a Magic Packet (see below) to her/his PC
suspend timeout, the hibernate timeout, and other options, for powering it on (if it was previously suspended or
according to what the operating system offers. Of course, powered off).
Gicomp can be effective only if power management strategies • Remote Control. E-Net-Manager also allows users to
can be decided centrally and cannot be disabled by the user. remotely control their own PCs. To this end, each user
To overcome the limitations of the previous power can access her/his personal account on the system and
management systems, in this paper we propose a E-Net- check the status of each registered PC (i.e., whether it is
Manager, a sensor-based system that leverages information on, off, or sleeping). In addition, the user can perform
provided by sensors, in addition to user-defined rules. specific actions, depending on the state of the PC. For
Basically, the PC is switched off when the user is leaving instance, it is possible to turn off or suspend an active
her/his working area, and resumed when she/he approaches it. PC, or switch on a sleeping PC.
To this purpose, presence detectors are used. In principle, any
kind of device could be used to detect the presence/absence of In addition to implement the above described strategies, E-
the user in the working area. In practice, to be cost effective, E- Net-Manager also provides the following features.
Net-Manager relies on devices that are already available in the • Security and privacy. Each communication within the
environment and are typically used for other purposes. Hence, system is secured through encryption and authentication
they do not require any additional cost. The list of such sensors so as to prevent malicious users from accessing critical
includes attendance recorders, card-enabled doors, Bluetooth- information (e.g., presence of a user or status of a PC).
enabled phones, and software tools such as Google Calendar. • Low intrusiveness. The system operates transparently to
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II the user (i.e., without any interaction) while trying, at
presents the power management strategies implemented in E- the same time, to avoid any possible discomfort to
Net-Manager. Section III discusses the system architecture, her/him.
while Section IV provides some implementation details. • Interoperability. The system can manage any PC,
Section V concludes the paper. irrespective of its operating system.

II. POWER MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES III. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

E-Net-Manager relies on information provided by both the In this section we describe the architecture of E-Net-
user (or system administrator) and presence detectors. Based Manager. We assume that the system has to work in the
on this information, it identifies periods when the user is far context of a large network composed of many hosts and
from her/his working area (e.g., office or building) and turns organized into several subnets. Also, the network can extend
off the PC. Similarly, it switches on the PC as soon as the user over multiple buildings, such as a university or corporate
approaches again the working area. Finally, the system allows campus. Finally, the power management system is expected to
the user to remotely check and control the status of her/his PC. work also in networks using dynamic assignment of IP
More specifically, E-Net-Manager leverages the following addresses (DHCP), private IP addresses (NAT), or in the
three classes of events. presence of Firewalls.
• Static Control Rules. Each user has an account on the The system architecture follows the client-server paradigm
system and can, thus, define rules for all the PCs and includes several components, as shown in Figure 2. Before
associated with her/his account. It is possible to define describing the various components, however, it may be
rules to switch on, suspend and turn off a PC [5] at a worthwhile introducing two basic technologies used by E-Net-
specific time of the day (for any day of the week). The Manager, namely Wake-on-LAN (WoL) and eXtensible
corresponding actions are executed automatically by the Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).
system, i.e., without any user intervention. By properly Wake-on-LAN [3] is a mechanism designed for Ethernet
configuring the system, it is possible to keep the PC on network interface cards (NICs) and allows the system to
only during working hours, while avoiding, at the same remotely turn on a powered off or suspended PC. To this end, a
time, to annoy the user with undesired actions. For component of the NIC remains always active – only
instance, in case of suspension or shutdown, the system consuming a small amount of energy – so as to receive the
preliminary checks whether the user is still using her/his “power on” command from the server. This command consists
PC. If so, the operation is deferred.

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of a special packet called Magic Packet containing the MAC the server machine sends a “power on” command to the Proxy.
address of the target PC. Then, the Proxy sends the Magic Packet to the target PC.
The eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) The Client part of the system consists of all those PCs that
[6] is a message-oriented communication protocol based on are under the control of the power management system. Our
XML. XMPP is used for communication between the different system requires that a simple software module (client module)
components of the system (i.e., PCs, server, proxies, and is installed on each PC. The behavior of the client module is
sensors). Specifically, each PC is an XMPP independent node fully transparent to the user. Whenever a rule defined for a PC
with its own identifier (called JID). Similarly, the server has its becomes active, or a sensor detects the user's absence, the
own JID. Hence, all information exchanged within the system Power Manager sends a “power off” (“suspension”) command
forms XML streams. In XMPP, connections are started by to the PC. The client module on the PC is in charge of
clients and are persistent. This allows a bidirectional receiving and executing this command. However, to limit the
communication also in networks with NAT servers or intrusiveness of power management, it preliminary checks
Firewalls. The connection between a PC and the Server can be whether the command can be actually executed. For instance, a
created with both SSL and TLS encryption, thus achieving “power off” (or “suspension”) command is aborted, and
communication confidentiality and server authentication. deferred, if the client module detects a mouse or keyboard
Clients are authenticated using SASL (Simple Authentication activity.
and Security Layer) through JID-password pairs. The last, but not least important, component of our system
is made up by presence detectors. While, in principle, any
Sensors
Server device can be potentially used in E-Net-Manager to detect the
Time card
presence/absence of the user within/from the working area, the
Bluetooth system is conceived to leverage presence detectors that are
Google already available in the environment for other purposes, e.g.,
Calendar
attendance recorders, card-enabled doors, Bluetooth-enabled
Presence
phones, as well as software tools such as Google Calendar. Of
course, it may happen that different detectors must be used
Router depending on the context and users (e.g., attendance recorders
Switch
are typically not used by faculty members).
Proxy server 1 Proxy server 2
IV. IMPLEMENTATION
We have completely implemented the server part of the
Client 1 Client 2 Client 3 Client 4 system, the proxy, the client module for Unix and (Unix-like)
operating systems, and the user interface. In addition we have
Figure 2 - Architecture of E-Net-Manager. integrated in our system two different kinds of presence
detector, namely attendance recorders and Bluetooth phones.
Let us now turn our attention to the various components of
We provide below some implementation details about the
E-Net-Manager that are depicted in Figure 2. The Server side
different system components.
provides the power management service to controlled PCs. It
For the server part of the system, we used MySQL as a
consists of a number of software processes that are listed
relational database to store data about users and PCs, as well as
below, along with a brief description of their service.
to store static rules defined by users. The XMPP service is
• Power Manager. Manages static rules, information provided by eJabberd, an open-source XMPP server. The
coming from sensor, and remote control requests; in Power Manager is structured as a multi-threaded (C++)
addition, it sends commands to controlled PCs to program that uses the Boost Asio library to create timers for
change their energy status. triggering actions defined by users (through static rules). The
• Database server. Stores data about PCs and rules Power Manager periodically (once in a day) reads the rules in
defined by users and the system administrator. the database and activates specific timers for triggering
• Web server. Allows users to (i) check the status of their commands at scheduled times. The Power Manager uses the
PCs, (ii) control them remotely, and (iii) define rules for Gloox library to implement the necessary XMPP
“power on”, “suspension” and “power off” actions. functionalities.
• XMPP server. Allows the communication between the Also the Proxy has been completely implemented.
server and the PCs to control. Currently it can register itself to the Server and communicate
its own subnet address. In addition, it can receive “power on”
If the network consists of many subnets, the Server may not commands from the Power Manager and send Magic Packets
be on the same subnet of the PC to control. In such a case, a to the target PC.
Proxy server is placed in each subnet, so as to remotely turn on The client module is currently available only for Unix (and
PCs in that subnet. This is because the Magic Packet [3] is Unix-like) hosts. It is implemented as a daemon starting at boot
transmitted to the broadcast address of the subnet where the time and is able to (i) receive commands from the Power
target PC resides and, hence, it requires that the sender and Manager, and (ii) power off or suspend the PC. It also monitors
receiver are located on the same subnet. A Proxy is a host with the mouse and keyboard activity in order to check the user’s
a permanent connection to the Server. Whenever a “power on” presence. Both the client module and the Proxy are
rule for a PC becomes active, the Power Manager running on programmed in C++ and use the Gloox library.

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 As far as presence detectors, presently we have integrated Finally, some few words about the user interface. E-Net-
in our system the following devices. Manager is designed to be unobtrusive and, thus, it limits the
user interaction to the minimum. The client module simply
• Attendance Recorders. We have managed the displays a notification message if a “power off” or
attendance recorder system in such a way that, “suspension” command has been received, so that the user can
whenever a user clocks in or out, a special message – decide to abort it. In addition, the user can interact with the
containing the user id and the performed action (i.e., power management system through a Web interface. In our
clock in/out) – is sent to the Power Manager. Since the implementation we have used Apache as web server, and all
user is entering/exiting his working area, the Power web pages have been implemented in PHP and Javascript
Manager will send an appropriate command to the (using jQuery). The user can log in to the web server and
user’s PC (or corresponding Proxy). perform all the supported actions, i.e., (i) check the status of
• Bluetooth-enabled phones. We use an approach similar her/his PCs and remotely control them; (ii) view/change the
to that proposed in [7] that leverages the discovery static rules defined for her/his PCs; (iii) view/change dynamic
mechanism used by Bluetooth devices. Specifically, we rules that leverage information from supported sensors. As an
assume that the user has a Bluetooth-enabled mobile example, Figure 3 shows the page of a generic user. For each
phone and the PC is equipped with a Bluetooth interface user’s PC, the system displays its status, through proper icons.
(both assumptions are quite common nowadays). In The user can perform specific actions, by clicking on specific
addition, the mobile phone and PC are configured in buttons, so as to switch on, switch off or suspend her/his PC.
such a way that they establish a Bluetooth connection,
whenever they happen to come in contact. A specific V. CONCLUSIONS
software module, running on the PC, periodically In this paper we have presented E-Net-Manager, an
checks whether the mobile phone is still in contact (i.e., automated system for power management of networked PCs in
the user is within the coverage range of the Bluetooth large environments, that leverages information provided by
receiver, which is in the order of 10 m). If the mobile presence sensors, in addition to static rules defined by the user.
phone is not detected for a certain time interval, the In principle, any presence detection system can be used.
software module assumes that the user is far and puts However, E-Net-Manager is intended to use presence detectors
the PC into the sleep state. Since the PC is in sleep that are already available in the environment, so as to be cost
state, the user can quickly resume it (manually) when effective and low intrusive. We have already implemented all
she/he comes back. We verified that the reactivation the system components and we have integrated a couple of
process is very fast as the PC is again fully active in a presence detectors in our system. As a further step, we plan to
few seconds. However, we are currently trying to integrate additional hardware and software detectors. Also, we
automate the re-activation operation as well. plan to deploy and test our system in a large computing
In addition to the above mentioned hardware detectors, we environment (e.g., our university college).
are currently trying to integrate also software detectors, such as
Google Calendar. The idea is to exploit information stored in
Google Calendar to trigger appropriate power management REFERENCES
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