Networks will be the next frontier in energy efficiency if a program kicked off by router maker Juniper Networks and test-equipment vendor Ixia gains a wider following.

The companies unveiled the Energy Consumption Rating (ECR) Initiative on Tuesday at a lab in Santa Clara, California. The initiative has set up a method of measuring the power efficiency of certain classes of network devices and is making it openly available so anyone can use it to test equipment.

There have long been low-power benchmarks for PCs and servers, such as those from the Energy Star program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But the networks that link those systems haven't been held to the same level of scrutiny, representatives of the participating companies and the EPA said Tuesday. Juniper and Ixia launched ECR in order to make quick progress toward a specification that could later be adopted by a formal standards body such as the ITU (International Telecommunication Union), said Luc Ceuppens, senior director of marketing at Juniper. Working from scratch at a formal standards body might take two to three years, he said.

The ECR methodology can determine the number of watts a network element consumes per gigabit per second of traffic. On Tuesday, in a test lab where Ixia said it can simulate the traffic generated by a triple-play telecommunications service for 250,000 people, the methodology was built into an Ixia measurement application called IxGreen and used to test a Juniper T1600 carrier core router. The router, which has a theoretical maximum throughput of 640G bps (bits per second), consumed 9.03 watts per gigabit per second, the testers found. It was tested at 98 percent traffic load as well as 49 percent and idle. Correcting for the different load levels, it scored 8.81 watts per G bps.

ECR today is designed to test individual systems in the network, but over the next year, the group plans to work out a way to test the efficiency of the whole network.

Juniper acknowledged that it helped kick off the effort because it believes its equipment is more efficient than many rival products, and the demonstration also showed off Ixia's iSimCity lab and IxGreen software. But other vendors and testing providers are free to use the methodology themselves, executives of the companies said. The methodology is designed to be repeatable so results from different labs can be compared.

The people formulating ECR have talked about it with representatives of Cisco Systems, the dominant data networking vendor, which made some suggestions but didn't join the initiative, Ceuppens said. Cisco is leading discussions on energy efficiency efforts in standards bodies and other industry groups, including the ITU and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the company said in a statement.