An Energy Efficient Ethernet Strategy Based on Traffic Prediction and Shaping

Recently, different communities in computer science, telecommunication, and control systems have devoted a huge effort towards the design of energy efficient solutions for data transmission and network management. This paper collocates along this research line and presents a novel energy efficient strategy conceived for Ethernet networks. The proposed strategy, which exploits the opportunities offered by the IEEE 802.3az amendment to the Ethernet standard (known as energy efficient Ethernet) is based on the possibility of predicting the future traffic from the analysis of the current data flow. In agreement with the results of such a dynamic prediction, Ethernet links can be forced into a low power consumption state for variable intervals. Theoretical bounds are derived to detail how the performance figures depend on the parameters of the designed strategy and scale with respect to traffic load. Furthermore, simulation results carried out with both real and synthetic traffic traces are presented to prove the effectiveness of the strategy, which leads to considerable energy savings at the cost of only a limited bounded delay in data delivery.