An Energy Saving Scheme for Multilane-Based High-Speed Ethernet

In this paper, we propose a scheme for partially dynamic lane control for energy saving in multilane-based high-speed Ethernet. In this scheme, among the given transmission lanes, at least one lane is always operating, and the remaining lanes are dynamically activated to alleviate the network performance in terms of queuing delay and packet loss in the range of acceptance. The number of active lanes is determined by the decision algorithm based on the information regarding traffic and queue status. The reconciliation sublayer adjusts the transmission lane with the updated number of lanes received from the algorithm, which guarantees no processing delay in the media access control layer, no overhead, and minimal delay of the exchanging control frames. The proposed scheme is simulated in terms of queuing delay, packet loss rate, lane changes, and energy saving using an OPNET simulator. Our results indicate that energy savings of around 55% (or, when the offered load is less than 0.25, a significant additional savings of up to 75%) can be obtained with a queuing delay of less than 1 ms, a packet loss of less than 10(-4), and a control packet exchange time of less than 0.5 mu s in random traffic.