Model Predictive Control based Adaptive Frame Coalescing in Energy Efficient Ethernet

Frame coalescing is a well-established technique which manages the low power idle (LPI) mode supported by energy efficient Ethernet (EEE) interfaces. Frame coalescing enables EEE interfaces to remain in the LPI mode for a certain amount of time upon the arrival of the first frame (timer-based coalescing), or until a predefined amount of traffic accumulates in the transmission buffer (size-based coalescing). In this paper, we propose a novel open-loop dynamic coalescing technique, namely MPC-mean, that is based on model predictive control (MPC) and queuing theory. In contrast to conventional timer-based coalescing, the proposed method enables the update of the timer parameter repeatedly throughout the duration of the LPI mode of a single coalescing cycle by taking into account the arrival instants and sizes, of the frames waiting in the buffer. The proposed MPC-mean method attempts to minimize the energy consumption of the Ethernet link, under constraints on mean of the queue waiting time. The effectiveness of the algorithm is validated using simulations with synthetic and actual traffic traces.