Dual-mode Energy Efficient Ethernet with Packet Coalescing: Analysis and simulation

We design and formulate Packet Coalescing for Dual-Mode EEE links at 40 Gb/s and higher. Packet Coalescing is to collect multiple packets before transmitting them on a link as a burst of back-to-back packets. By coalescing packets into bursts, the overhead of transition times can be reduced and nearly energy-proportional operation can be achieved, albeit at the expense of a bounded increase in the packet delay. We analytically model the power consumption of Dual-Mode EEE with Packet Coalescing and present closed-form formulae for the average percentage of time a link would spend in each low-power mode and transition. We also simulate a 40 Gb/s Dual-Mode EEE link with Packet Coalescing and present results suggesting that the compromise in the average per-packet delay is likely to be worthwhile under most circumstances considering the power reduction.