In this work we evaluate the feasibility and performance of a low-power (a few Watts), wireless active gateway in servicing concurrent client requests of realistic web applications. Results show that the I/O-intensive Squid web caching can be well-supported on the low-power platform, with comparable performance and an order of magnitude better energy efficiency compared to Squid running on a conventional machine. On the other hand, the two computation-intensive services we tested, WebAnywhere that supports enhanced human-computer interaction and Feng-Office that offers documents- editing and sharing, may lead to excessively long delays when hosted solely on our low- power active gateway. We further propose new ideas for: load management to offload excessive load at a node into a remote or nearby execution site(s), information sharing among neighbour nodes using the broadcasting nature of the wireless network, and using power management policies to achieve a fine-grain power-proportionality across nodes.
This work contributes to significant energy saving in the Internet-based information technology and consequently improves the sustainability of computing.