015 - Energy Efficient Ethernet Being Studied by IEEE
[29-Mar-2007]
US energy consumption from electronic equipment is consuming 200 TWh of energy per year, costs an estimated $16 billion/year and generates nearly 150 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Network equipment alone consumes an estimated 13 TWh/year. Gartner recently stated that power hungry hardware and global fuel prices could lead to energy costs eating up more than one-third of IT budgets in the next 5 years. With energy conservation being high on the political agenda, IEEE 802.3 has established a study group to investigate what it can do to reduce the overall energy demand from Ethernet equipment.
006 - 10 Gigabit Ethernet over Legacy Multimode Fibre
[16-Feb-2007]
The distance capability of existing 10 Gigabit Ethernet products is severely limited by modal bandwidth. 10GBASE-SR supports only 33m with OM1 and 82m with OM2. A 4-channel CWDM version, 10GBASE-LX4, increases the operating range to 300m using existing multimode fibre types however this solution is complex and products are not widely available. 10GBASE-SR operating distance may be increased to 300m by using OM3 multimode fibre, but OM3 is more expensive than OM1/OM2 and its installed base is no yet significant. This white paper describes a more advanced version of 10 Gigabit Ethernet that operates over increased lengths of legacy multimode fibre.
Gigabit Ethernet posed many challenges in its bid to operate over installed twisted pair cabling but the final solution was accomplished with a 1 million transistor silicon chip. The networking industry has since repeated this accomplishment with a 10 Gigabit system. This white paper describes its design and provides an assessment of the market need for 10 Gigabit over copper.
004 - The Impact of Bit Error Rate on LAN Throughput
[16-Feb-2007]
Claims that a low level of re-transmissions could have a devastating affect on LAN throughput prompted us to examine the mechanisms that might cause this. The following analysis challenges the claim that just 1% packet re-transmission can reduce throughput by as much as 80% but illustrates that such claims are not without foundation.
We will attempt to answer a number of related questions using basic technical assumptions but also by adopting a worst case scientific approach.
Bandwidth capacity of network technologies has increased by a factor of 10 every 5 years. In fact, Moore’s Law is clearly illustrated by the evolution of LANs, which have increased in speed from 1 Mbit/s to 10 Gbit/s over the last 20 years. This white paper reviews the transmission requirements of network applications operating at data rates of 100 Mbit/s and above. It evaluates their operation over structured cabling as defined by 2nd edition industry standards.
