摘要：As network equipment consumes much more energy than ever before, research effort has been focusing on developing the access network protocol that aims to achieve communication with maximum energy efficiency. Ethernet is the most widely deployed access network protocol around the world. To improve energy efficiency in Ethernet protocol, IEEE 802.3az working group has defined low-power idle(LPI)-based Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) specification. In this paper, an enhanced synchronizing packet coalescing mechanism is proposed which improves energy efficiency in small Ethernet switch with basis on EEE specification. This mechanism is designed to predict traffic characteristic for active period by measuring incoming traffic amount during certain period. Once the traffic characteristic is predicted, threshold value would be adjusted to be optimal for the traffic load. Network performance was evaluated through simulation experiment that was performed assuming Poisson distribution traffic and burst traffic pattern respectively. 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.
关键词：Synchronizing packet coalescing mechanism; Energy Efficient Ethernet; IEEE;802.3az; Small Ethernet switch
