ABSTRACT
DIST - University of Genoa, Italy, and CNIT, University of Genoa Research Unit, Italy
Roberto Bruschi
CNIT, University of Genoa Research Unit, Italy
Chiara Lombardo
DIST - University of Genoa, Italy, and CNIT, University of Genoa Research Unit, Italy
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 4.2 An Overview on Novel Green Network Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
4.2.1 Internet Evolution and Concern over Energy Wastes . . . 85 4.2.2 Current Approaches and Concepts for Low-Energy
Networking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 4.3 Benchmarking Methodologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
4.3.1 ECR 3.0.1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 4.3.2 ATIS 060015.03.2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 4.3.3 RFC 2544 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 4.3.4 Other Upcoming Propositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
4.4 Comparison among the Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 4.5 Performance Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
4.5.1 Extending Current Evaluation Methodologies . . . . . . . . . . 93 4.5.2 Test Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
4.6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Acknowledgement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Author Contact Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Fundamentals,
For many years, the main concern of the ICT industries was network performance, so that the new services being offered could work properly and be available to a larger and larger number of customers. The solution adopted to achieve this goal has been just feeding the networks with more bandwidth: as a result, today networks are constantly working at rates that are hardly reached at rush hours. Although the expansion of the Internet is not such a recent phenomenon, the research for more efficient solutions has been disregarded until recently. But this problem can not be postponed anymore. The main cause that brought many Telecom vendors to reconsider their strategies is the constant increase of energy costs, but the impact on the environment is also alarming. In fact, the ICT industries produce 2% of the global CO2 emissions, overcoming the carbon footprint due to aviation [1]. In this context, ground-breaking work on energy consumption in the Internet was conducted by Gupta et al. [2] in 2003, and by Christensen et al. [3] in 2004, showing the importance of energy efficiency in communication networks. Today, researchers, service providers and manufacturers are constantly occupied in this field, with the creation of numerous projects in order to obtain and standardize effective solutions. Among others, a partnership among universities, device manufacturers and Telcos has been established for the creation of an initiative funded by the European Community, called ECONET [4]. The purpose of this initiative consists in developing innovative solutions and device prototypes for wired network infrastructures within 2013. It is also worth mentioning the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) [5]: its task consists in defining a set of requirements and specifications to make possible the detection of inconsistencies among future standards.
