Energy Efficient Networks (Tutorial)

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contribute an increasing share to global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Green ICT and Energy Efficiency (EE) are becoming megatrends in research, development and deployment of telecommunication networks. The tutorial presents an overview of latest data on ICT energy consumption and highlights the trends in the corresponding research efforts to reduce it. Network operators mandate EE in their RFQs and the ITU-T declares that all standardisation has to be judged for EE. Research frameworks like the European Community FP7 take sustainability and energy efficiency into the focus of funded projects to mitigate climate change effects and energy consumption. Many major conferences now add sessions on energy efficiency and a growing number of dedicated papers on energy efficient networking are appearing. The strongest growing contribution to ICT's energy consumption is from network servers and from wireless networks. Previous efforts to improve wireless energy efficiency focused on hardware components, in particular of power amplifiers and the operational time of mobile, battery-powered devices. Today, however, industry and academia are taking a more holistic approach. The focus will be on current developments in wireless communication network, but server farms have quite similar issues and approaches to energy efficiency. The tutorial addresses engineers and managers from the ICT community wishing to enter the field of Energy Efficient (EE) Networks.