A US patent has been granted to Antonio Fernández Anta, Research Professor at IMDEA Networks. Patent US 8,554,894 B2 on ‘Network scheduling for energy efficiency’ addresses the need to reduce the costs associated to the operation of an increasingly vast global telecommunication infrastructure. It establishes a novel technique for scheduling packets to be processed in the network devices that compose a communication network. This invention increases the energy efficiency of a given network while also minimizing packet delay and therefore speeding up the traffic of information through the network. The patent abstract states:
A network comprising a plurality of network devices is configured to implement scheduling for energy efficiency. In one aspect, a set of network devices interconnected in a line within a network is identified, and a common frame size is established. For each of the network devices of the line, active and inactive periods for that network device are scheduled in a corresponding frame having the common size, with the frames in the respective network devices of the line being time shifted relative to one another by designated offsets. For each of one or more of the active periods of each of the network devices of the line, received packets are scheduled for processing in that network device.
Co-inventors of this patent are Daniel Matthew Andrews and Yihao Zhang, both from from Bell Labs, New Jersey (USA).
Patent webpage: http://www.google.com/patents/US8554894