Burst Transmission for Energy-Efficient Ethernet

The proposed Energy-Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard reduces energy consumption by defining two operation modes for transmitters and receivers: active and low power. Burst transmission can provide additional energy savings when EEE is used. Collecting data frames into large-sized data bursts for back-to-back transmission maximizes the time an EEE device spends in low power, thus making its consumption nearly proportional to its traffic load. An initial evaluation shows that the additional savings in the scenarios considered range from 5 to 70 percent for conventional users and approximately 50 percent for large data centers.