The amount of electricity consumed by devices connected to the Internet in the U.S. has rapidly increased and now amounts to over 2% of total electricity used, which is about 74 TWh/yr costing over $6 billion annually. This energy use can be categorized as direct and induced. Much of this energy powers idle links, switches, and network-connected hosts and is thus wasted.This dissertation contains the first-ever investigation into the energy efficiency of Ethernet networks. A method for matching Ethernet link data rate with link utilization, called Adaptive Link Rate (ALR), is designed and evaluated. ALR consists of a mechanism to change the link data rate and a policy to determine when to change the data rate. The focus of this dissertation is on the analysis and simulation evaluation of two ALR policies. The simplest ALR policy uses output buffer thresholds to determine when to change data rate. This policy is modeled using a Markov chain. A specific challenge was modeling a state-dependent service rate queue with rate transition only at service completion. This policy was shown to be unstable in some cases, and an improved policy based on explicit utilization measurement was investigated. This more complex policy was evaluated using simulation. A synthetic traffic generator was developed to create realistic synthetic network traffic traces for the simulation evaluation. Finally, an improved method for detecting long idle periods using quantile estimation was investigated.Characterization of network traffic showed that proxying by a low power device for a high power device is feasible. A prototype proxy for a Web server was developed and studied. To maintain TCP connections during sleep time periods of a host, a new split TCP connection method was designed. The split connection method was prototyped and shown to be invisible to a telnet session.This research has contributed to the formation of an IEEE 802.3 Energy Efficient Ethernet study group. It is thus very likely that ALR will become a standard and will achieve industry implementation and widespread deployment. This will result in energy savings of hundreds of millions of dollars per year in the U.S. alone.

Wireless devices search for access points when they want to connect to a network. A devicechooses an access point based on the received signal strength between the device and theaccess point. That method is good for staying connected in a local area network but it doesnot always offer the best performance, which can result in a slower connection. This is thestandard method of connection for wireless clients, which will be referred to as the standardprotocol. Larger networks commonly have a lot of access points in an area, which increasesthe coverage area and makes loss of signal a rare occurrence. Overlapping coverage zonesare also common, offering multiple choices for a client. The company Inteno wanted an alternativeconnection method for their gateways. The new method that was developed wouldforce the client to connect to an access point depending on the bitrate to the master, as wellas the received signal strength. These factors are affected by many different parameters.These parameters were noise, signal strength, link-rate, bandwidth usage and connectiontype. A new metric had to be introduced to make the decision process easier by unifying theavailable parameters. The new metric that was introduced is called score. A score system wascreated based on these metrics. The best suited access point would be the one with the highestscore. The developed protocol chose the gateway with the highest bitrate available, while thestandard protocol would invariably pick the closest gateway regardless. The developed protocolcould have been integrated to the standard protocol to gain the benefits of both. Thiscould not be accomplished since the information was not easily accessible on Inteno’s gatewaysand had to be neglected in this thesis. / Trådlösa enheter söker efter accesspunkt när de vill ansluta till ett nätverk. En enhet väljer enaccesspunkt beroende på den mottagna signalstyrkan mellan enheten och accesspunkten.Denna metod medför en stabil uppkoppling i ett lokalt nätverk, men medför inte alltid bästamöjliga prestanda, vilket kan resultera i en långsammare anslutning till Internet. Detta ärstandard uppkopplings metod för trådlösa klienter, vilket kommer refereras som standardprotokollen. Större nätverk har vanligtvis en mängd olika accesspunkter i ett område, vilketgör att signalstyrkan sällan förloras. Överlappande täckningsområden är också vanliga ochger en klient flera alternativa accesspunkter att välja mellan. Företaget Inteno ville tacklaproblemet genom att skapa en ny anslutningsmetod för deras nätverksnoder. Den nya metodenskulle tvinga klienter att ansluta sig till en accesspunkt beroende på bithastigheten mothuvudnoden, så väl som den mottagna signalstyrkan. Faktorerna påverkas av många olikaparametrar. Parametrarna var, brus, signalstyrka, länkhastighet, dataanvändning och anslutningstyp.Ett nytt mått behövde införas för att göra beslutsprocessen enklare, genom att förenade tillgängliga parametrarna. Det nya måttet som infördes var poäng. Ett poängsystemskapades och baserades på de önskade värdena. Den accesspunkten med högst poäng erbjödden bästa uppkopplingen till huvudnoden. Det utvecklade protokollet valde nätverksnodenmed den högsta överföringshastighet som var tillgänglig, medan standardprotokollet alltidvalde den närmaste nätverksnoden utan hänsyn till andra faktorer. Den utvecklade protokolletkunde ha integrerats med standardprotokollet för att utnyttja fördelarna av bägge protokollen.Detta var inte möjligt eftersom informationen inte var lättåtkomlig på Intenos nätverksnoderoch fick försummas i avhandlingen.