A Study on Energy Savings in a Network Interface Card Based on Optimization of Interrupt Coalescing

Abstract

The concept of energy-efficient networking has begun to spread in the past few years, gaining increasing popularity. A common opinion among networking researchers is that the sole introduction of low consumption silicon technologies may not be enough to effectively curb energy requirements. Thus, for disruptively boosting the network energy efficiency, these hardware enhancements must be integrated with ad-hoc mechanisms that explicitly manage energy saving, by exploiting network-specific features. The IEEE 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard is one of such efforts. EEE introduces a low power mode for the most common Ethernet physical layer standards and is expected to provide large energy savings. However, it has been shown that EEE may not achieve good energy efficiency because mode transition overheads can be significant, leading to almost full energy consumption even at low utilization levels. Coalescing techniques such as packet coalescing and interrupt coalescing were proposed to improve energy efficiency of EEE, but their implementations typically adopt a simple policy that employs a few fixed values for coalescing parameters, thus it is difficult to achieve optimal energy efficiency. The paper proposes adaptive interrupt coalescing (AIC) that adopts an optimal policy that could not only improve energy efficiency but support performance. AIC has been implemented at the sender side with the Intel 82579 network interface card (NIC) and e1000e Linux device driver. The experiments were performed at 100 M bps transfer rate and show that energy efficiency of AIC is improved in most cases despite performance consideration and in the best case can be improved up to 37% compared to that of conventional interrupt coalescing techniques.