Interval-based adaptive interrupt coalescing in high-speed networks

Abstract

The IEEE 802.3az standard, known as Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE), is one of recent efforts to improve energy efficiency in communications. However, EEE may not achieve good energy efficiency on some traffic patterns. Coalescing techniques were proposed to solve this problem, but their implementations typically employ a simple polity and need further optimization. Adaptive interrupt coalescing (AIC) has been recently proposed to suggest a better policy, but AIC may not be utilized in high-speed networks having 1G or 10G bandwidth. The paper proposes interval-based adaptive interrupt coalescing (IAIC) that can enhance energy efficiency in high-speed networks. EEE with IAIC at the sender has been implemented and experimented with at 1Gbps bandwidth. The experimental results show that IAIC achieves better energy efficiency than other approaches and can reduce up to 71.59% of energy consumed in a network interface card with no energy savings technique.