Power Efficiency and Delay Tradeoff of 10GBase-T Energy Efficient Ethernet Protocol

In this paper, we study the power efficiency and delay performance of the burst mode transmission (BTR) strategy for the IEEE 802.3az energy efficient Ethernet (EEE) protocol. In the BTR strategy, the Ethernet interface goes to sleep once its transmission buffer becomes empty and wakes up as soon as the first arrival has waited for time r or the N-th frame arrives at the interface. Based on the number of arrivals during the vacation time, a new approach is proposed to analyze the M/G/1 queue with vacation times that are governed by the arrival process and the r and N parameters of BTR strategy. Our key idea is to establish the connection between the vacation time and the arrival process to account for their dependency. We first derive the distribution of the number of arrivals during a vacation time based on an event tree of the BTR strategy, from which, we obtain the mean vacation time and the power efficiency. Next, from the condition on the number of arrivals at the end of a vacation period, we derive a generalized P-K formula of the mean delay for EEE systems, and prove that the classical P-K formula of the vacation model is only a special case when the vacation time is independent of the arrival process. Our analysis demonstrates that the r policy and N policy of the BTR strategy are compensating each other. The r policy ensures the frame delay is bounded when the traffic load is light, while the N policy ensures the queue length at the end of vacation times is bounded when the traffic load is heavy. These results, in turn, provide the rules to select appropriate r and N. Our analytical results are confirmed by simulations.