Efficient Energy Management in Networking

Abstract

In the last couple of decades, we have witnessed major technological changes that have transformed the way we live, work, and interact with one another. One of the major technology facilitator in charge of for this remarkable transformation in our global society is the deployment and use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) equipment. In fact, today with the current pandemic going on ICT has become highly integrated in our society that includes the dependence on ICT of various sectors, such as business, transportation, education, and the economy to the point that we now almost completely depend on it. In the last few years, the energy consumption resulting from the usage of ICT equipment and its impact on the environment have resulted in a lot of interests among researchers, designers, manufacturers, policy makers, and educators. Hence energy efficiency has become important bar that is being increasingly used to evaluate energy consumption of devices, hardware and various networking architectures, systems, and communication protocols. I will cover the same and present some of the motivations driving the need for energy-efficient communications in this paper. There have been a lot of approaches to minimize energy consumption by communication devices, protocols, networks, end-user systems, and data centers and I will describe and discuss some of the recent techniques and solutions that have been proposed to minimize energy consumption, also look to the future of networking from a new angle, where energy efficiency and environmental concerns are viewed as fundamental design criteria and forces that need to be harnessed to continually create more powerful networking equipment.