An energy efficient traffic shaping algorithm for Ethernet-based multimedia industrial traffic

Industrial communication systems, like the very popular real-time Ethernet networks, are ever more used to carry multimedia traffic, i.e. that generated by applications employing complex sensors such as, for example, video cameras. Ethernet networks, however, revealed to be quite inefficient in terms of energy saving since the power consumption of a link between any two devices does not decrease significantly during the (statistically long) idle periods, i.e. the intervals of time in which the link is not crossed by traffic. In this paper we present a novel traffic shaping technique that aims at saving energy when the multimedia industrial traffic has self similar characteristics. In particular, the proposed method combines the statistical properties of the traffic, with the opportunities offered by the recent amendment to the Ethernet standard, called Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE), to design a strategy based on the analysis of current traffic levels and the prediction of the incoming data flow. Simulation results are presented to prove the effectiveness of the strategy which leads to considerable energy savings at the expense of only a limited bounded delay in frame delivery.