COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The Ethernet Alliance launched a new effort at the recent Interop show to honor student papers that advance Ethernet technology. The first recipient of the award is Francisco Blanquicet of the University of South Florida at Tampa, who developed a method of using the Pause command in 802.3 standards to reduce the power dissipation of Ethernet switches.

The White Paper Challenge contest was part of a Universities Program which the alliance launched last fall. Alliance chairman Brad Booth said the program aims to get more academic engineering and computer science programs involved in developing new Ethernet concepts within the overall structure of IEEE 802.3 standards.

Blanquicet's paper was chosen not only for its "green" potential for reducing power in data centers and enterprise Ethernet networks, but also because his methodology did not require updates to deployed Ethernet switches.

Blanquicet said his work was spurred by the realization that there are many aspects of overall software standards in Ethernet, some of them decades old, that have not been tapped for their full capabilities. His advisor, Ken Christensen at USF, helped center his work on how a Pause command could be used for better control of power in Ethernet switching, a method he calls Pause Power Cycle, or PPC.

The paper was inspired in part by the work of the 802.3az task force on "Energy Efficient Ethernet." Blanquicet said that in studying existing ways of improving efficiency, he realized that Pause flow-control could be used as a means of cycling between on and off states, using a cycle time of under 50 ms so as not to affect time-sensitive traffic such as voice and video.

Based on figures from 2000 of 95,000 Ethernet switches in the U.S. consuming 3.2 terawatts/hours of electricity, Blanquicet estimated that power savings of $132 million per year could be achieved in the U.S. alone. Annual energy consumption could be cut to 1.65 terawatts/hours.

Blanquicet also said he is extending his Ethernet research to look at adaptive PPCs that could adjust for duty cycles.