A Look at Energy Efficient System Opportunities with Community Network Clouds

Community networking is an emerging model of a shared communication infrastructure in which communities of citizens build and own open networks. Community networks offer successfully IP-based networking to the user. In addition, some hosts are connected to the network nodes in order to provide network management and end user services. Recently, clouds have been proposed for community networks. Some research projects such as Clommunity have started deploying computational infrastructure to enable cloud computing within community networks. In this paper we propose different options for such community clouds to contribute to energy efficient systems, in particular regarding cloud-based services and in relation to Smart Grid. Further discussion and interaction with the research initiatives on energy efficient systems should identify the most promising approach and outline possible ways for implementation.