{"id":306176,"date":"2010-04-19T09:30:55","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T16:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?p=306176"},"modified":"2016-10-16T12:54:02","modified_gmt":"2016-10-16T19:54:02","slug":"trying-cure-pc-insomnia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/trying-cure-pc-insomnia\/","title":{"rendered":"Trying to Cure PC Insomnia"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research<\/em><\/p>\n

Everyone understands the energy-saving benefits of shutting down PCs or leaving them on standby before leaving the office. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that companies can achieve cost savings of $25 to $75 per PC annually if users activate system-hibernation features. The Gartner Group released a study (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> in February 2009 which showed that a company with 2,500 PCs could save more than $40,000 a year simply by using power management. A Forrester report quotes companies saying they have cut greenhouse gas emissions by 65 percent and saved $3 million a year in electricity bills by going green in IT.<\/p>\n

Power management is one of the simplest, most effective ways for a company to reduce energy bills, and operating systems, such as Windows 7<\/a>, enable this by defaulting to sleep mode after an hour of idle time. Yet many corporate users will override this setting just in case they need after-hours remote access to their office PCs.<\/p>\n

A research project called Greening Corporate Networks with Sleep Proxy, deployed for more than six months in Building 99, Microsoft Research\u2019s Redmond headquarters, could offer a solution that lets more PCs sleep undisturbed overnight.<\/p>\n

\"Greening

The team that worked on the Greening Corporate Networks with Sleep Proxy project (from left): Carlos Garcia Jurado Suarez, Richard Hughes, Jitendra Padhye, Michel Goraczko, Aman Kansal, and Jay Lorch.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe reality,\u201d says Jitendra Padhye<\/a>, senior researcher with Microsoft Research Redmond<\/a>\u2019s Networking Research Group<\/a>, \u201cis that habits are hard to change, so the ideal scenario is one where a desktop goes to sleep when not in use and awakens when the user needs to access it, without any need for the user to change behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

Padhye\u2014along with intern Joshua Reich of Columbia University and two members of Microsoft Research Redmond\u2019s Networked Embedded Computing group: Michel Goraczko, senior research developer, and Aman Kansal, researcher\u2014have developed a sleep-proxy solution that saves energy by enabling PCs in sleep mode to be available for remote network access; the PCs wake up only when needed. The core idea behind a sleep proxy is to enable a machine to sleep while the sleep proxy maintains the machine\u2019s network presence.<\/p>\n

A Real-World Test Bed<\/h2>\n

The challenge for Padhye and his team was to build a practical sleep-proxy solution for deployment in a typical corporate network consisting of servers and desktop machines. The solution would have to support a usage scenario in which the user\u2019s office PC goes to sleep and is awakened seamlessly and automatically when the user attempts a remote connection to log in or gain file access.<\/p>\n

There were four goals for the Sleep Proxy solution:<\/p>\n