Energy efficient networking: Avoiding a future energy crunch

Estimates suggest that in ten years backbone network traffic will increase by a factor of thirty, which will require a corresponding increase in network capacity. However, at the same time, as the traffic will continue to explosively increase, analyses also indicate that capacity scaling may be nearing an end for optical fibers, Silicon CMOS and cellular systems. Clearly this is undesirable and novel technical approaches are needed to address communications sustainability. In this paper we describe the problem and novel technical approaches to confront the issue.