Power consumption of the Information and Communication Technology sector (ICT) has recently become a key challenge. In particular, actions to improve energy-efficiency of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are becoming imperative. To this purpose, in this paper we focus on reducing the power consumption of access nodes in an ISP network, by controlling the amount of service capacity each network device has to offer to meet the actual traffic demand. More specifically, we propose a Green router

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... router) implementing a congestion control technique named Active Window Management (AWM) coupled with a new capacity scaling algorithm named Energy Aware service Rate Tuner Handling (EARTH). The AWM characteristics allow to detect whether a waste of energy is playing out, whereas EARTH is aimed at invoking power management primitives at the hardware level to precisely control the current capacity of access nodes and consequently their power consumption. We test the benefits of the AWM-EARTH mechanism on a realistic scenario. Results show that the capacity scaling technique can save up to 70% of power consumption, while guaranteeing Quality of Service and traffic demand constraints.