Energy-aware heterogeneous access and sensor networks

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Recent studies show that the power consumption of today's Internet is around 0.3% of the electricity supply of a typical OECD country. However, as broadband access becomes increasingly commonplace in most developed countries, the power consumption of the Internet is estimated to rise to more than 7% of a country's national electricity supply for an average access rate rising to 100 Mb/s, which translates into a power consumption of several TWh and expenses of millions of dollars and tons of carbon gas emissions per year. The power consumption of the current Internet is largely dominated by its first-mile access networks. It was shown that in a typical network scenario, transport and core networks represent roughly 30% of the total power consumption, while access networks account for the remaining 70%. In this research proposal, we explore new ideas to improve the energy-efficiency of Ethernet passive optical network based fiber-to-the-home/business and hybrid fiber-wireless (FiWi) broadband access networks. The proposed research activities will study the opportunities of power-saving techniques and mechanisms that help save power in both the optical and wireless network domains. Among others, we study coordinated sleep scheduling algorithms for optical network units and wireless access points, data aggregation through network coding, proxying, and selective multipath routing. Toward the realization of a future green video-dominated Internet, we pay particular attention to exploiting the unique traffic characteristics of various types of video applications, e.g., video streaming, to improve the bandwidth-efficient video transport in FiWi access networks. While most of the previous work on "green" communications networks focued on the reduction of their energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, we will study the role of energy-efficient access networks in other highly relevant sectors, namely, electricity grids and transport. We explore the opportunities of enhancing FiWi broadband access networks with fiber optic sensors and wireless sensors and adopt them to convert traditional electric power grids, the largest man-created CO2 emission source, into future smart grids.