Monitoring and measurement system for green operation of geographically distributed ICT services

Abstract

Despite recent efforts and important results already achieved, the reduction of energy consumption and carbon emissions by Information and Communication Technologies is still far from the expected goals. As the annual growth in traffic is doubling every two years with more and more connections to the Internet, to be energy and carbon-aware it is paramount to implement a Monitoring and Measurement System which supports green strategies in a geographically distributed environment. Such an environment has some specific challenges that must be taken into account, such as the WAN connection, security and latency concerns. On the other hand, it also provides opportunities to reduce operational costs and emissions, improve reliability and resources management etc. This work proposes a framework which is capable of supporting green metrics in network monitoring. The framework comprises temporally differentiated data on emission factors and provides ground information able to support different applications. We have implemented the framework in a nationwide testbed and our experiments show the framework is able to provide the ground information for customizable green metrics, like power/energy, traffic, and carbon equivalent emissions. This framework can be used as a support for a variety of applications which depend on energy and emissions metrics.