INTERNET
INTelligent Energy awaRe NETworks
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Introduction
Energy efficient processes are increasingly key priorities for ICT
companies with attention being paid to both ecological and economic
drivers. Although in some cases the use of ICT can be beneficial to the
environment (for example by reducing journeys and introducing more
efficient business processes), countries are becoming increasingly aware
of the very large growth in energy consumption of telecommunications
companies. For instance in 2007 BT consumed 0.7% of the UK's total
electricity usage. In particular, the predicted future growth in the
number of connected devices, and the internet bandwidth of an order of
magnitude or two is not practical if it leads to a corresponding growth
in energy consumption. Regulations may therefore come soon, particularly
if Governments mandate moves towards carbon neutrality. Therefore the
applicants believe that this proposal is of great importance in seeking
to establish the current limits on ICT performance due to known
environmental concerns and then develop new ICT techniques to provide
enhanced performance. In particular they believe that substantial
advances can be achieved through the innovative use of renewable sources
and the development of new architectures, protocols, and algorithms
operating on hardware which will itself allows significant reductions in
energy consumption. This will represent a significant departure from
accepted practices where ICT services are provided to meet the growing
demand, without any regard for the energy consequences of relative
location of supply and demand. In this project therefore, we propose
innovatively to consider optimised dynamic placement of ICT services,
taking account of varying energy costs at producer and consumer. Energy
consumption in networks today is typically highly confined in switching
and routing centres. Therefore in the project we will consider block
transmission of data between centres chosen for optimum renewable energy
supply as power transmission losses will often make the shipping of
power to cities (data centres/switching nodes in cities) unattractive.
Variable renewable sources such as solar and wind pose fresh challenges
in ICT installations and network design, and hence this project will
also look at innovative methods of flexible power consumption of block
data routers to address this effect. We tackle the challenge along three
axes: (i) We seek to design a new generation of ICT infrastructure
architectures by addressing the optimisation problem of placing compute
and communication resources between the producer and consumer, with the
(time-varying) constraint of minimising energy costs. Here the
architectures will leverage the new hardware becoming available to allow
low energy operation. (ii) We seek to design new protocols and
algorithms to enable communications systems to adapt their speed and
power consumption according to both the user demand and energy
availability. (iii) We build on recent advances in hardware which allow
the block routing of data at greatly reduced energy levels over
electronic techniques and determine hardware configurations (using on
chip monitoring for the first time) to support these dynamic energy and
communications needs. Here new network components will be developed,
leveraging for example recent significant advances made on developing
lower power routing hardware with routing power levels of approximately
1 mW/Gb/s for ns block switching times. In order to ensure success,
different companies will engage their expertise: BT, Ericsson, Telecom
New Zealand, Cisco and BBC will play a key role in supporting the
development of the network architectures, provide experimental support
and traffic traces, and aid standards development. Solarflare, Broadcom,
Cisco and the BBC will support our protocol and intelligent traffic
solutions. Avago, Broadcom and Oclaro will play a key role in the
hardware development.
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