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ECONET (low Energy COnsumption NETworks) project is a 3-year IP project
(running from October 2010 to September 2013) co-funded by the European
Commission under the Framework Programme 7 (FP7), addressing the Strategic
Objective ICT-2009.1.1 “The Network of the Future”.
The ECONET project aims at studying and exploiting dynamic adaptive
technologies (based on standby and performance scaling capabilities) for wired
network devices that allow saving energy when a device (or part of it) is not
used.
The project will be devoted at re-thinking and re-designing wired network
equipment and infrastructures towards more energy-sustainable and eco-friendly
technologies and perspectives.
Enabling the reduction of energy requirements of wired network equipment by 50%
As the Future Internet is taking shape, it is therefore recognised that, among
other basic concepts and key aspects, energy efficiency should pervade the
network infrastructure as a whole to such extent as to become part of the
network design criteria and to carry across multiple networking domains for
the achievement of a general target. There are two main motivations that drive
the quest for “green” networking: environmental one, related to the reduction
of wastes and impact on CO2 emissions, and the economic one, stemming from the
need of operators to reduce the cost of keeping the network up and running at
the desired service level, while counterbalancing the ever-increasing cost of
energy.
The overall idea is to introduce novel green network-specific paradigms and
concepts enabling the reduction of energy requirements of wired network
equipment by 50% in the short to mid-term (and by 80% in the long run).
To this end, the main challenge will be to design, develop and test novel
technologies, integrated control criteria and mechanisms for network equipment
enabling energy saving by adapting network capacities and resources to current
traffic loads and user requirements, while ensuring end-to-end Quality of
Service.
Therefore, this project aims at exploring a coordinated set of approaches and
concepts to deliver novel solutions and technologies for reducing the carbon
footprint of next generation infrastructures for telecommunication networks.
Thanks to the presence of major manufacturing companies, telecoms and ISPs,
ECONET will propose its innovative technologies to standardization bodies for
extending in the green direction the next generation network and Future
Internet architectures and protocols.
The ECONET project will introduce, explore and develop two main kind of
network-specific energy-saving capabilities:
Dynamic Power Scaling: allows network devices tuning dynamically the trade-off
between energy profile and processing capacity, while meeting the actual
traffic load and QoS constraints;
Smart Standby: allows putting currently unused parts of a network devices into
very low energy consumption modes, where only some basic functionalities are
performed.
