Challenges and Opportunities in Green Networking

Reducing mankind’s carbon footprint and becoming more sustainable is rapidly becoming one of the main challenges of our age. The networking industry needs to respond to those challenges not only by enabling applications that allow users to save energy (such as, replacing travel with teleconferencing), but also by making networking technology itself significantly more energy-efficient. As a result, the aspect of minimizing network power consumption is rapidly increasing in importance. This position paper aims to articulate opportunities where energy efficiency of networks can be improved, to point out the associated technical challenges, and to identify corresponding research challenges.