Flexible Power Management

PoE (Power over Ethernet) provides power management that supports power reservation, power prioritization, and power limiting. The operator can assign a priority to each PoE port. When the power budget of the PoE switch has been exhausted, the higher priority ports are given preference over the lower priority ports. Lower priority ports are forcibly stopped to supply power in order to provide power to higher priority ports.

The static power management feature allows operators to reserve a guaranteed amount of power for a PoE port. This is useful for powering up devices which draw variable amounts of power and provide them an assured power range within which to operate. Class-based power management allocates power at class limits as opposed to user-defined limits.

In the Dynamic Power management feature, power is not reserved for a given port at any point of time. The power available with the PoE switch is calculated by subtracting the instantaneous power drawn by all the ports from the maximum available power. Thus, more ports can be powered at the same time. This feature is useful to efficiently power up more devices when the available power with the PoE switch is limited.

PoE also provides a global usage threshold feature in order to limit the PoE switch from reaching an overload condition. The operator can specify the limit as a percentage of the maximum power.