With the increasing concern for global warming, the impact of Internet power consumption is gaining interest. In this paper, we explore, for the first time, the relationship between network robustness, performance and Internet power consumption. We first discuss such a relationship based on data collected from Internet sources. Next, we propose a modeling framework to size that relationship.

It is shown that when designing networks based on power consumption, careful attention should be paid to the trade-off between energy consumption and network performance since doing otherwise would lead to unreliable networks.