Power Control of High Speed Network Interconnects in Data Centers

With continuing speed increases of communication links found both inside and outside the servers in a data center, link power management is becoming an important issue. In this paper we examine width control of such links and show that it provides substantial benefits over other methods for latency sensitive applications. The paper also presents the design of a specific width control algorithm called DWCA (dynamic width control algorithm) that is effective and easily implemented in hardware at high data rates.