INTelligent Energy awaRe NETworks (INTERNET)

Energy efficient processes are increasingly key priorities for ICT companies with attention being paid to both ecological and economic drivers. Although in some cases the use of ICT can be beneficial to the environment (for example by reducing journeys and introducing more efficient business processes), countries are becoming increasingly aware of the very large growth in energy consumption of telecommunications companies. For instance in 2007 BT consumed 0.7% of the UK's total electricity usage. In particular, the predicted future growth in the number of connected devices, and the internet bandwidth of an order of magnitude or two is not practical if it leads to a corresponding growth in energy consumption. Regulations may therefore come soon, particularly if Governments mandate moves towards carbon neutrality. Therefore the applicants believe that this proposal is of great importance in seeking to establish the current limits on ICT performance due to known environmental concerns and then develop new ICT techniques to provide enhanced performance. In particular they believe that substantial advances can be achieved through the innovative use of renewable sources and the development of new architectures, protocols, and algorithms operating on hardware which will itself allows significant reductions in energy consumption. This will represent a significant departure from accepted practices where ICT services are provided to meet the growing demand, without any regard for the energy consequences of relative location of supply and demand. In this project therefore, we propose innovatively to consider optimised dynamic placement of ICT services, taking account of varying energy costs at producer and consumer. Energy consumption in networks today is typically highly confined in switching and routing centres. Therefore in the project we will consider block transmission of data between centres chosen for optimum renewable energy supply as power transmission losses will often make the shipping of power to cities (data centres/switching nodes in cities) unattractive. Variable renewable sources such as solar and wind pose fresh challenges in ICT installations and network design, and hence this project will also look at innovative methods of flexible power consumption of block data routers to address this effect. We tackle the challenge along three axes: (i) We seek to design a new generation of ICT infrastructure architectures by addressing the optimisation problem of placing compute and communication resources between the producer and consumer, with the (time-varying) constraint of minimising energy costs. Here the architectures will leverage the new hardware becoming available to allow low energy operation. (ii) We seek to design new protocols and algorithms to enable communications systems to adapt their speed and power consumption according to both the user demand and energy availability. (iii) We build on recent advances in hardware which allow the block routing of data at greatly reduced energy levels over electronic techniques and determine hardware configurations (using on chip monitoring for the first time) to support these dynamic energy and communications needs. Here new network components will be developed, leveraging for example recent significant advances made on developing lower power routing hardware with routing power levels of approximately 1 mW/Gb/s for ns block switching times. In order to ensure success, different companies will engage their expertise: BT, Ericsson, Telecom New Zealand, Cisco and BBC will play a key role in supporting the development of the network architectures, provide experimental support and traffic traces, and aid standards development. Solarflare, Broadcom, Cisco and the BBC will support our protocol and intelligent traffic solutions. Avago, Broadcom and Oclaro will play a key role in the hardware development.

We will aim to make impact through this research using new mechanisms as we as schemes that have been most successful in the past. 1. Current Strategy of Applicants in Engaging Users and Beneficiaries in Research The following existing strategies will be extended for use in the programme grant: 1.1 Economy: We will rely heavily on regular meetings with industry including: (i) focussed and just involving individual companies (ii) EU Networks of Excellence (iii) meetings to draw complementary companies together (sometimes via a roadmapping activity), (iv) standards meetings (we have close links into the Ethernet and IETF (for internet standards)) (v) showcase events where we insist on demonstrating (rather than just presenting) our work. We also are very committed to encouraging secondments. 1.2 Knowledge: In addition to transfer through publication, key examples of creating impact include our making available of our channel models on an open access basis to individuals and companies, our network traffic models now in use by Ericsson and Freescale, providing open source software such as xen and VNA. 1.3 People: In recent years we have sought to encourage our researchers to broaden their interests. One, for example, now takes a leading role in encouraging joint research (and related activities) between Cambridge University and overseas countries including China, Italy, Spain and Mexico, having brought senior policy leaders to the UK as a result. 1.4 Society: We have increasingly sought to influence policy, for example having contributed to consultations by the Photonics KTN, CST, the Royal Society, and the TSB. In the specific area of Energy Policy, at Leeds we are engaged with the Institute of Earth, Energy and the Environment addressing sustainability issues in society and at Cambridge we are involved in the Centre for Science and Policy. Of course one of our Co-Is (Prof MacKay) already advises the Department of Department of Energy and Climate Change on science and policy. Our public engagement is evidenced for example by Cambridge currently hosting the largest Science Festival in the UK. 2. Future Impact Plan of the INTERNET Programme Grant We will seek to continue the above strategies as they are proven to deliver impact. We will focus on maintaining and indeed growing links with our existing industrial collaborators as we believe that their markets will continue to grow. For example, Ethernet services are expected to grow substantially, with estimates of sales in the US alone being $27B over the next few years. In terms of our energy saving measures, in the UK BT's energy consumption is estimated at 3.468TWh/year in 2009, and we calculate that that a modest 20% energy saving through our methods will translate to an OPEX saving of about 69million per year for an operator. 2.1 New forms of Communications and Collaboration New additional activities to enhance the impact of our research would include: (i) organising special workshops to carry out research scenario/grand challenge setting and roadmapping. (ii) enhancing flexible industrial placements for researchers (iii) making use of KTP and small grant schemes such as those organised by the TSB. Training PhD students which is expected to generate long lasting impact. 2.2 Exploitation Routes This project will lead to exploitable concepts suitable for licensing, for example in energy efficient components, where we have an excellent track record in licensing to world leaders such as Avago with components already in production or in software. In other cases new spin-off companies will be set up to commercialise architectures, systems, software and protocols.