Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Publication
    Increasing the MTU size for Energy Efficiency in Ethernet
    (Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2010-06-23) ; ; ;
    The commonly used Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU) on the Internet has remained unchanged for many years at around 1500 bytes due mainly to backward compatibility issues. This is in contrast with link data rate, which has increased by several orders of magnitude. In this paper, a new advantage of using larger MTUs is introduced, namely Energy Efficiency. In wire-line environments, the link power consumption is generally roughly independent of the number of frames that are transmitted resulting in a poor energy efficiency. This will change with the development of standards like IEEE 802.3az, Energy Efficient Ethernet. This new standard allows a link to enter a low power mode when there are no frames to transmit therefore making power consumption almost proportional to the link load. In this context the use of larger MTUs minimizes the number of transitions between the active and low power modes thereby improving energy efficiency. The benefits of using larger MTUs in terms of energy efficiency are analyzed in this paper.
      370Scopus© Citations 1
  • Publication
    Implications of energy efficient Ethernet for hubs and switches
    The efficient use of energy in communications is an area of growing interest. Until recently energy efficiency received little attention in most wireline communications standards and implementations. In many cases, the transmitter and receiver operate at full power, even when no data is being sent. This is the case in most wireline Ethernet standards that results in a considerable waste of energy. Efforts are now underway to develop new standards, such as energy efficient Ethernet, with the aim of reducing energy consumption. The changes introduced by energy efficient Ethernet have different implications for each network element. The implications for hubs are different to those for switches. These implications are analysed in this paper. It is shown that the adoption of the new standard will make hubs less energy efficient than switches. The implications studied in this paper illustrate the potential impact of energy efficient Ethernet on Ethernet networks.
      427Scopus© Citations 2