The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old
Abstract
Today, the ICT industry has a massive carbon footprint (a few percent of the worldwide emissions) and one of the fastest growth rates. The Internet accounts for a large part of that footprint while being also energy inefficient; i.e., the total energy cost per byte transmitted is very high. Thankfully, there are many ways to improve on the current status; we discuss two relatively unexplored directions in this paper. Putting network devices to “sleep,” i.e., turning them off, is known to be an efficient vector to save energy; we argue that harvesting this potential requires new routing protocols, better suited to devices switching on/off often, and revising the cor- responding hardware/software co-design. Moreover, we can reduce the embodied carbon footprint by using networking hardware longer, and we argue that this could even be benefi- cial for reliability! We sketch our first ideas in these directions and outline practical challenges that we (as a community) need to address to make the Internet more sustainable.
Research Area: Sustainable Networking
People
Talk
BibTex
@inproceedings{jacob2022internet,
author = {Jacob, Romain and Vanbever, Laurent},
title = {{The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old}},
booktitle = {1st Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems Design and Implementation (HotCarbon 2022)},
address = {La Jolla, CA, USA},
year = 2022,
month = jul,
publisher = {University of California, Center for Networked Systems},
doi = {10.3929/ETHZ-B-000558651},
url = {https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/558651/hotcarbon22-jacob.pdf}
}Research Collection: 20.500.11850/558651
Slide Sources: https://gitlab.ethz.ch/projects/41841