  Recently, different communities in computer science, telecommunication and
control systems have devoted a huge effort towards the design of energy
efficient solutions for data transmission and network management. This paper
collocates along this research line and presents a novel energy efficient
strategy conceived for Ethernet networks. The proposed strategy combines the
statistical properties of the network traffic with the opportunities offered by
the IEEE 802.3az amendment to the Ethernet standard, called Energy Efficient
Ethernet (EEE). This strategy exploits the possibility of predicting the
incoming traffic from the analysis of the current data flow, which typically
presents a self-similar behavior. Based on the prediction, Ethernet links can
then be put in a low power consumption state for the intervals of time in which
traffic is expected to be of low intensity. Theoretical bounds are derived that
detail how the performance figures depend on the parameters of the designed
strategy and scale with respect to the traffic load. Furthermore, simulations
results, based on both real and synthetic traffic traces, are presented to
prove the effectiveness of the strategy, which leads to considerable energy
savings at the cost of only a limited bounded delay in data delivery.
