ICT Energy Challenges, Impact and Solutions

The explosion of the Internet traffic volume resulting from both the worldwide broadband subscriber base extension and the increasing number and diversity of available applications and services require a relentless deployment of new technologies and infrastructures to deliver the expected userexperience. At the same time, it also raises the issue of the energy consumption and energy cost of the Internet and more generally of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The energy consumption is becoming one of the key challenges for the ICT industry and it is only expected to grow in importance. In order to deploy and support future data communication networks in an economic and sustainable way, service and content providers need to address the energy consumption of their networks as one of their top priorities. In this article we provide some key numbers on the ICT energy consumption and the energy hot spots in the Internet. We then describe an online tool designed by Bell Labs to help the ICT industry and its associated stakeholders fully understand the energy challenges and the opportunities from new technology evolutions: G.W.A.T.T. (Global ‘What if’ Analyzer of NeTwork Energy ConsumpTion) is publicly available at http://gwatt.net/. Finally we share some insights on promising research results that can strongly improve the effectiveness of the most energy voracious domains of ICT. Keywords—ICT, energy efficiency, energy consumption, sustainability, network infrastructure evolution