UNDERSTANDING AND MANAGING ENERGY USE IN FUTURE NETWORKS

This 2 year project will leverage Lancaster University's entire computational resource network to form a 1000 host testbed for end-to-end energy consumption management options.The study will characterise current usage patterns and evaluate the opportunities presented by emerging applications and technologies for consumption reduction. The study will assess both central control options and engaging information sharing coupled with participative management decision making as means for reducing consumption. The study will propose and test an optimal combination of the two approaches.Additional outcomes will include future network sustainability forecasts, user behaviour predictions and novel consumption management strategies.

We expect the proposed project to have considerable impact on the academic support, governmental and commercial sectors and ultimately the wider public. The direct impact will obviously be savings in energy consumption by computer networks, but we believe that the impact should be much wider than this. Energy saving relies on all stakeholders developing accurate intuitions about both local and remote consequences of their choices. We feel very strongly that our approach of using the affordances of state of the art collaborative IT applications to a) improve engagement with, and understanding of, complex information sets and b) improve participation of users in the management decision making process, has very wide potential. Indeed if we can confirm the hypothesis that our approach enables end users to appreciate system behaviours more completely and make better choices (and/or be more accepting of externally enforced choices), we intend to rapidly develop further projects exploring how this can be used for wider energy saving in homes and businesses, and also for other critical socio-technical agendas such as adapting to the consequences of climate change. The direct beneficiaries of our research will obviously be the formal project partners outlined below, and also any network administrators with an interest in energy management (i.e. all network admins?). We believe that benefits should also flow rapidly to other organisations with an interest in more general energy saving initiatives (such as the members of the TAHI industry sector group). All these parties should be able to offer improved solutions to their customers thereby enhancing their reputations and their incomes significantly. We believe that if we are successful there is potential for considerable public benefit (painless mitigation of climate change) worldwide. Our results will obviously be publicised in a wide range of fora (web site, Trade magazines, Industry conferences, discussion groups, etc.), through the proposed project workshop, and through our community of up to 1000 users. We plan to explore further opportunities in the public media during the project as we are keen to establish a wide public engagement with what we are attempting. As a first step we are aiming to create an interactive project web site where the project investigators are contributing to an energy blog and members of the public are invited to participate in the discussion. We would hope to publicise this through contacts in the science volunteer community, local schools and societies and local media outlets. We are proposing to collaborate with a wide range of partners First and foremost, we will work closely throughout the project with the University of Passau, with whom we have already begun a collaboration and who have complementary research projects funded from German national sources. Lancaster ISS will help us with administration practice in campus networks and will help us collaborate through JISC with campus administrators elsewhere. Lancaster City Council will help us with government administration practice and will help us identify suitable fora for disseminating our results to a wider government audience. BT and Arup will help us with commercial administration practice and appropriate dissemination fora. Cisco and Agilent and the University business partnership units will assist with identifying commercial suppliers of any novel hardware and software components of the solutions we identify. All of these partners will be part of the advisory committee and will attend meetings every 6 months In addition we plan to develop wider links via TAHI (Energy Management and Sustainability Industry Sector Group) and international links via the IEEE intelligent environments conference (which is attended by both academia and industry).