An Enhanced Adaptive Power Control Mechanism for Small Ethernet Switch

Ethernet is the most widely deployed access network protocol around the world. IEEE 802.3az WG released the EEE standard based on LPI mode to improve the energy efficiency of Ethernet. This paper proposes improved adaptive power control mechanism that can enhance energy-efficiency based on EEE from small Ethernet switch. The feature of this mechanism is that it predicts the traffic characteristic of next cycle by measuring the amount of traffic flowing in during certain period and adjusts the optimal threshold value to relevant traffic load. Performance evaluation results indicate that the proposed mechanism improves overall performance compared to traditional mechanism, since it significantly reduces energy consumption rate, even though average packet delay increases a little bit.