A Survey of Green Networking Research

Reduction of unnecessary energy consumption is becoming a major concern in wired networking, because of the potential economical benefits and of its expected environmental impact. These issues, usually referred to as "green networking", relate to embedding energy-awareness in the design, in the devices and in the protocols of networks. In this work, we first formulate a more precise definition of the "green" attribute. We furthermore identify a few paradigms that are the key enablers of energy-aware networking research. We then overview the current state of the art and provide a taxonomy of the relevant work, with a special focus on wired networking. At a high level, we identify four branches of green networking research that stem from different observations on the root causes of energy waste, namely (i) Adaptive Link Rate, (ii) Interface proxying, (iii) Energy-aware infrastructures and (iv) Energy-aware applications. In this work, we do not only explore specific proposals pertaining to each of the above branches, but also offer a perspective for research.Comment: Index Terms: Green Networking; Wired Networks; Adaptive Link Rate; Interface Proxying; Energy-aware Infrastructures; Energy-aware Applications. 18 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Softwarization in Future Mobile Networks and Energy Efficient Networks

The data growth generated by pervasive mobile devices and the Internet of Things at the network edge (i.e., closer to mobile users), couple with the demand for ultra-low latency, requires high computation resources which are not available at the end-user device. This demands a new network design paradigm in order to handle user demands. As a remedy, a new MN network design paradigm has emerged, called Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), to enable low-latency and location-aware data processing at the network edge. MEC is based on network function virtualization (NFV) technology, where mobile network functions (NFs) that formerly existed in the evolved packet core (EPC) are moved to the access network [i.e., they are deployed on local cloud platforms in proximity to the base stations (BSs)]. In order to reap the full benefits of the virtualized infrastructure, the NFV technology shall be combined with intelligent mechanisms for handling network resources. Despite the potential benefits presented by MEC, energy consumption is a challenge due to the foreseen dense deployment of BSs empowered with computation capabilities. In the effort to build greener 5G mobile network (MN), we advocate the integration of energy harvesting (EH) into future edge systems

Green IS in Infrastructure Software

As the world is becoming a more connected place, organizations become more dependent on infrastructure software such as operating systems and middleware. Infrastructure software and the hardware it is operated on consumes a lot of electricity and in a world where the climate threat is increasingly imminent, aspects of Green IS are more relevant than ever. There are a lot of research done on the characteristics of Green IS but not so much on what is practically adopted, especially not within organizations whose main industry is not IT. In this study, we examine to what extent retail and manufacturing organizations adopt aspects of Green IS to increase their impact on environmental sustainability. Four infrastructure software platforms were surveyed through four group interviews with a total of 25 participants, on their platform’s adoption of five Green IS aspects. We found that virtualization and cloud computing as well as efficiency and optimization are well adopted aspects, where automation and monitoring and KPIs are not as prominent. The last aspect, data growth management, was in all cases very little or not at all adopted

The Impact of MIS Software on IT Energy Consumption

The energy consumption of IT has a great impact on operational costs, in addition to being important for social responsibility and system scalability issues. Research on IT energy efficiency has always focused on hardware, whereas within the software domain it has mainly focused on embedded systems. In this paper we present the preliminary results of some experiments that we conducted to evaluate MIS applications from an energy efficiency point of view. We analyze in details some selected case studies, including 2 ERPs, 2 CRMs and 4 DBMS. Our evidence suggests i) that not only the infrastructural layers, but also the MIS applications layer does impact on the energy consumption; ii) that different MIS applications satisfying the same functional requirements consume significantly different amounts of energy; and iii) that in some scenarios energy efficiency cannot be increased simply by improving time performance

TOWARDS AN OPTIMAL INVESTMENT BUDGET FOR GREEN DATA CENTERS

The growing demand for data storage and computational power has increased the global deployment of data centers. Today, data centers are the backbone of modern companies, but also main consumers of energy and among the major producers of greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, the development and implementation of sustainable and energy efficient Green Data Centers (GDC) has gained relevance from a scientific and practical point of view. Even though technological progress has revealed opportunities for improvements in energy efficiency, little effort has been made regarding the business case of GDC. In this paper, we analyze the coherence of economic and environmental objectives of GDC investments by conceptualizing a decision model using traditional financial metrics and by applying the model on exemplary data. We analyze both costs and realized energy savings associated with the GDC investment. Besides, we examine the influnce of volatile energy prices on the investment decision. By integrating risk and return into one decision calculus, we determine the optimal GDC investment budget which reconciles long-term economic and environmental objectives. Our theoretical findings are supported by an application example of a GDC investment project. We hereby demonstrate the structural under-investment when disregarding volatile energy prices in decision-making

Multi-disciplinary Green IT Archival Analysis: A Pathway for Future Studies

With the growth of information technology (IT), there is a growing global concern about the environmental impact of such technologies. As such, academics in several research disciplines consider research on green IT a vibrant theme. While the disparate knowledge in each discipline is gaining substantial momentum, we need a consolidated multi-disciplinary view of the salient findings of each research discipline for green IT research to reach its full potential. We reviewed 390 papers published on green IT from 2007 to 2015 in three disciplines: computer science, information systems and management. The prevailing literature demonstrates the value of this consolidated approach for advancing our understanding on this complex global issue of environmental sustainability. We provide an overarching theoretical perspective to consolidate multi-disciplinary findings and to encourage information systems researchers to develop an effective cumulative tradition of research

Taming Energy Costs of Large Enterprise Systems Through Adaptive Provisioning

One of the most pressing concerns in modern datacenter management is the rising cost of operation. Therefore, reducing variable expense, such as energy cost, has become a number one priority. However, reducing energy cost in large distributed enterprise system is an open research topic. These systems are commonly subjected to highly volatile workload processes and characterized by complex performance dependencies. This paper explicitly addresses this challenge and presents a novel approach to Taming Energy Costs of Larger Enterprise Systems (Tecless). Our adaptive provisioning methodology combines a low-level technical perspective on distributed systems with a high-level treatment of workload processes. More concretely, Tecless fuses an empirical bottleneck detection model with a statistical workload prediction model. Our methodology forecasts the system load online, which enables on-demand infrastructure adaption while continuously guaranteeing quality of service. In our analysis we show that the prediction of future workload allows adaptive provisioning with a power saving potential of up 25 percent of the total energy cost

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte