Energy Efficient Networks

Dr.-Ing. Oliver Blume
Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs Stuttgart, Germany

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contribute an increasing share to global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Green ICT and Energy Efficiency (EE) are becoming megatrends in research, development and deployment of telecommunication networks. The tutorial pesents an oveview of latest data on ICT energy consumption and highlights the trends in the corresponding research efforts to reduce it.

Network operators mandate EE in their RFQs and the ITU-T declares that all standardisation has to be judged for EE. Research frameworks like the European Community FP7 take sustainability and energy efficiency into the focus of funded projects to mitigate climate change effects and energy consumption. Many major conferences now add sessions on energy efficiency and a growing number of dedicated papers on energy efficient networking are appearing.

The strongest growing contribution to ICT’s energy consumption is from network servers and from wireless networks. Previous efforts to improve wireless energy efficiency focused on hardware components, in particular of power amplifiers and the operational time of mobile, battery-powered devices. Today, however, industry and academia are taking a more holistic approach. The focus will be on current developments in wireless communication network, but server farms have quite similar issues and approaches to energy efficiency.

The tutorial addresses engineers and managers from the ICT community wishing to enter the field of Energy Efficient (EE) Networks. These areas include wireless base stations, network management and RF components, and also fixed access and server farm cooling. The objective is to gain an overview which parts of the network are most relevant for the energy consumption and which parts are critical with respect to the strong growth of data traffic rates. The tutorial will introduce the socio-economic background, the state-of-the-art, most relevant approaches and current research topics of two related projects.

Organisation

  • Introduction (30min)
    • Climate change and greenhouse gas emissions as megatrends
    • ICT energy consumption estimates: servers, devices, core networks, access networks, wired/wireless
    • Operator and user point of view
  • Fixed Networks (15min )
    • Routers
    • Data Center
      • energy efficiency metrics for data center
      • data center design
      • virtualisation and cloud computing
  • Wireless Networks (1h)
    • Last mile radio transmissions
    • Base station energy consumption (3G/HSPA/LTE, WiMAX, Wi-Fi)
    • Throughput vs. energy consumption tradeoffs and design choices
    • PA design; remote radio heads; passive cooling
    • Heterogeneous RANs and femtocells
    • Dynamic network management, interference coordination, and cooperative base stations
  • Ongoing green research initiatives with Alcatel-Lucent involvement (15min)
    • EARTH www.ict-earth.eu (wireless access, coordinated by Alcatel-Lucent)
      • energy efficiency framework
      • power model
      • deployment and network management
    • Green Touch www.Greentouch.org (fixed and wireless access, core, application)
      • information theoetical analysis
      • first results

Speaker information

Oliver Blume is working at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs in Stuttgart (formerly Alcatel Research & Innovation) as Senior Research Engineer in the Radio System Optimization department. He studied physics at the University of Hamburg (1990) and holds a Dr.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg (2000). Oliver has been working in the area of Integrated Optics, optical communication and wireless communication. His current research interests are in multi-radio resource management and in energy efficiency of radio communication systems. Oliver has participated in several EU and national research projects, like Ambient Networks, and ScaleNet. Currently he is involved in the EUFP7 project EARTH on Energy Efficiency, with manufacturers, operators and leading academia under the consortium lead of Alcatel-Lucent. He has published numerous papers both from Bell-Labs and from cooperative projects and is member of the Alcatel-Lucent Technical Academy (ALTA).