Green Networking: Reducing The Energy Use Of LAN Switches And Connected Hosts

Reducing the energy consumption of LAN switches and routers, and of connected hosts, is of interest for environmental, economic, and operational reasons. In this paper, the authors propose to investigate the ability to cycle an Ethernet link between on and off using Pause flow control and powering down during the off periods, and using existing Cisco switch and router deep packet inspection capabilities to control traffic to sleeping hosts enabling the hosts to sleep longer and not be woken-up by spurious traffic.