MUXER—A New Equipment for Energy Saving in Ethernet

Abstract

Nowadays, the rapidly increasing energy consumption of communication equipment is an economic and environmental problem that needs to be addressed. Small Local Area Networks (LAN) switches in the US alone consume about 8 TWh per year that corresponds to hundreds of millions of US dollars in electricity. A main reason is communication equipment, due to the fact that, Ethernet switches have to active all days even in low-traffic time. There are many approaches to make the switches sensitive with the different traffic load environment, but they have to put some changes to current Ethernet that cause the incompatibility issues. This paper proposes a new device called Modified Multiplexer (MUXER), which can control the power functions of switches without modifying the current Ethernet protocol. The MUXER devices are put before the switches in the network, which provide some functions to transfer incoming Media Access Control (MAC) data frames to the corresponding switches managed by MUXERs. By using the proposed device, the wasted energies in the network can be reduced, especially in the specified low-traffic time. We describe the result of numerical analysis and compare detail power consumption data between a normal and a network where MUXERs are installed. In this work, the explained result shows that if a network administrator can estimate the number of MUXER needed for a particular network and install accordingly, our device can provides a significant energy saving.

Keywords

• MUXER
• power management
• energy saving
• Ethernet switch
• local area networks