What does the “wake on pattern match” setting in advanced network adapter settings mean?

Wake-on-LAN (or WOL) is a method in which a special magic network packet can wake up a computer put into sleep mode. This feature has been available already a long time, and has been supported in Windows at least since Windows XP (I don't recall what options Windows NT and 2000 gave).

When Wake-on-LAN works as designed, it's a very useful feature. However, with Windows 10 especially, I've found that in networks where there are many different machines, your computer can wake up from sleep more than actually needed.

In addition to being simply able to toggle the option on and off, Windows network adapter settings (especially for traditional wired network adapters) offer a new setting called "wake on pattern match". This new option enables more versatile wake up on different WOL events and network packets than just the classic magic packet.

Since this option is by default enabled in many cases, your computer might wake from the sleep mode too often. Thus, you might wish to try disabling this new option.