Designing green network architectures using the ten commandments for a mature ecosystem

Abstract

The Climate Group notes that energy consumption by ICT activities represented 2% of global human activity in 2009 (Smart, 2012) [1]. ICT is therefore a sector contributing both to natural resource depletion and to greenhouse gas emission. Moreover, ICT generates considerable quantities of electronic waste, it emits radio waves (including GSM and WiFi) that can adversely affect human and animal health, and it can have an impact on the natural beauty of the landscape (e.g. antennas). A new challenge for ICT engineers is therefore to be able to design ICT more efficiently by considering environmental constraints. In the ecology domain, Benyus’ book “Biomimicry” (Benyus, 2002) [2] proposed ten commandments for mature ecosystems. The objective of this paper is to apply these commandments to ICT, by focusing on green network architecture design. The main developments in this research are the proposed relationships between the ten commandments and the networking domain and metrics for assessing both the project-system and the system-of-interest when designing green network architectures.