Hi Tony, Ron,

Please see inline.

Kind Regards
Gen chen

From: Tony Li <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Tony Li
Sent: 2026年8月6日 0:11
To: Chengen(GenChen) <[email protected]>
Cc: Bonica, Ron <[email protected]>; lsr <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Lsr] IS-IS Support for PCPPS

Hi Gen,

Please see inline.



1. Where is the actual deployment case?

PCPPS assumes networks have "excess capacity" that can be powered down. But in 
real carrier networks, that excess is usually design redundancy for failures. 
Can the authors point to a specific production network topology where shutting 
down redundant paths still satisfies the operator's redundancy policy?

We have three Tier 1 SP’s all interested in this technology. All are real 
carrier networks that you’ve heard of and regularly attend IETF.  The access 
portion of those networks show a very strong diurnal usage cycle.  In the most 
extreme example, 85% of the network is idle. Simulations show that our approach 
can put 70% of the network to sleep.

We have presented the motivational parts of this several times before, 
especially during the formation of the GREEN working group. You’re welcome to 
review those presentations.


[GC] Thanks for letting me know the focus is on the access portion. It seems 
that the typical design for access networks is dual‑homing or ring‑based — 
providing mostly two redundant paths between two points. This architecture is 
intentionally built for reliability and load sharing and with only two paths, 
powering down one removes all redundancy.

Please correct me if I am wrong, PCPPS works without compromising reliability 
when there are at least three disjoint paths between two points(so that at 
least two paths remain after powering down the spare paths while still 
preserving protection). The question is in the claimed simulation results 
(e.g., xx% of the network can be put to sleep), for the two‑path portions, are 
they excluded from the power‑saving calculations, or is the simulation assuming 
they can be safely powered down despite losing redundancy?


2. Wake-up latency and dead while asleep consideration

A Power Group can represent an interface, a line card, etc., wake-up latency 
varies from milliseconds to minutes. If PCPPS puts a line-card-level group to 
sleep and later needs it for fast recovery, the minutes level wake-up may break 
the service lossless requirement.

We intentionally do this with generous margins precisely so that we do not need 
to power things up for fast recovery.


[GC] It may depend on the type of the network and the requirements of the 
operators considering the wake-up latency. In some cases, it is mandatory.


More critically, how does the network know the sleeping component is still 
healthy? When PCPPS later tries to wake it up for recovery, what if it 
discovers the link is dead, does the current design have any mechanism to 
verify the health of sleeping Power Groups without fully waking them?

Failures are a fact of life.  Backhoes can strike regardless of whether the 
equipment is asleep. If links or components don’t come back up, then we try 
waking other components.  If this is a very serious concern, an implementation 
could periodically wake things.  At this point, this seems unnecessary.


[GC] Got it, yes it could be solved adding extended mechanisms.


3. Static power values vs. vendor-specific wake-up thresholds

The draft recommends static power values to avoid LSDB churn. But real hardware 
power consumption is load-dependent, and different vendors may have implemented 
power saving with step functions, not linear curves. A device may consume X 
watts at 20% load, but when load exceeds 40%, the internal controller wakes up 
a second component, and power jumps to X+Y W instantly. That threshold is 
vendor-proprietary and not advertised.

Now consider PCPPS, let’s say it moves traffic from path B to path A based on 
static values (A = 100W, B = 100W), letting B sleep (save 100W). The increased 
load on A crosses the 40% threshold — A wakes up extra components and jumps to 
300W. Net result: path B saves 100W, path A spends +200W — negative energy 
savings.

Were those extra components advertised?  PCPPS does consider that.  If A 
advertises a potential power savings of 100W, but it’s actually 200W, that 
seems like a very large misconfiguration/software error.


[GC] To be short,  increasing traffics in some paths may also need some 
limitations on the paths such as thresholds introduction to deal with 
unexpected situations where the overall energy savings can be negative.

Regards,
Tony


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