mardi 14 mai 2013

Networks in 2020: More traffic, less energy

A lire sur:  http://www.infoworld.com/d/networking/networks-in-2020-more-traffic-less-energy-218419

May 13, 2013

The GreenTouch industry consortium says new technologies could cut network power consumption by 90 percent

Networks could use far less energy by 2020 even though they'll be carrying much more traffic, an industry group says.
The GreenTouch consortium, formed in 2010 to speed up progress on more efficient networks, says it has identified technologies that together could cut network power needs by 90 percent even in the face of rapidly growing data demand. The group of equipment vendors, component makers and service providers will present that conclusion in a report due in mid-June.
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"There is potential with these new technologies to support the traffic growth and still make the energy consumption go down," said Thierry Klein, chairman of GreenTouch's technical committee. Klein also leads green research at Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs division.
The tools that make this possible include new devices, components, algorithms, architectures and protocols, Klein said. All have been proved in labs, he said. The potential energy savings represents a comparison between a 2010 network with that year's traffic levels and a theoretical 2020 network with projections of traffic amounts for that year.
"If you were to use all of those things together, this is the overall potential," Klein said. GreenTouch is working on other technologies that could drive even greater efficiency but weren't proven enough to include in the report, he said.
GreenTouch won't ship any products itself, but rather is helping to bring carriers and vendors together to find ways to reduce power consumption. When Alcatel-Lucent announced the formation of the group, it had 10 members, and that list has since grown to 50, including Huawei Technologies, Fujitsu, Samsung, Vodafone, China Mobile and numerous universities.
However, some of the biggest names in carrier networking, including Ericsson, Cisco Systems and Nokia Siemens Networks, aren't part of GreenTouch. Their absence could represent a missed opportunity for even more progress on green networks, according to Saverio Romeo, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan.
GreenTouch's findings are promising and could become real, but there are too many different green-network initiatives in play today, Romeo said. Broader efforts under standards bodies such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) or Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) could lead to even more power gains, he said.
"We are missing out on even greater efficiency ... if there is a lack of cooperation between these various activities," Romeo said.
However, most carriers will have plenty of motivation to invest in higher efficiency over the next several years, Romeo said. Along with growing demands for capacity, many carriers are facing flat revenue, he said. That will make the energy bill an obvious target for savings.
GreenTouch's Klein also believes carriers will want to invest in the new technologies, even though most of the features will require new equipment. "A dollar spent on energy is a dollar wasted today," Klein said.
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