Performance analysis of Energy Efficient Ethernet on video streaming servers

Current trends on traffic growth oversee a steady increase of video streaming services, and the subsequent development of the associated infrastructure to allocate and distribute such contents. One of the operational costs associated to this infrastructure is the power bill. Therefore any mechanism used to decrease it, reducing also the carbon footprint associated to it, is welcome. In this work we investigate the suitability of the recently standardized IEEE 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) for video traffic generated by video-streaming servers. The conclusion of the analysis is positive about the achievable energy savings, due to the inherent features of traffic patterns of video-streaming servers which help reducing the number of transitions between active and low-power modes in EEE.