Green Ethernet » Uncategorized http://www.greenethernet.com Green Ethernet Technology Wed, 07 Apr 2010 01:01:41 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.2 Is Green communication politics? http://www.greenethernet.com/is-green-communication-politics/ http://www.greenethernet.com/is-green-communication-politics/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 01:01:41 +0000 admin http://www.greenethernet.com/?p=45 Much discussion is being carried out on green communications. Some people support the idea as it can help to control the power consumption by communication systems. However, some people think it is a politic strategy by some companies. Their arguments are: If we look at the power consumption distribution at home, the communication facilities like modem consume a very small amount of energy compared to a refrig and a TV. For example, a modem consumes 5w power, while a refrig consumes several KW power. Thus, the effort on energy saving should be taken for a refig rather than a modem.

Green communications may not be critical for the access network. Rather, we may need to focus on power saving for the backbone networks. For example, the high power consumption of router could make it more and more difficult to disseminate heats of the router with the increase of routing capacity. Thus, the power consumption could be an eventual limiter for a router to further upgrade capacity. In addition, data centers such as Google and facebook data centers are another important sector that we can spend effort on saving power consumption as they are really power-hungry beasts.

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]]> http://www.greenethernet.com/is-green-communication-politics/feed/ 0 Third workshop on Green Communications 2010 (GreenComm’10) http://www.greenethernet.com/third-workshop-on-green-communications-2010-greencomm%e2%80%9910/ http://www.greenethernet.com/third-workshop-on-green-communications-2010-greencomm%e2%80%9910/#comments Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:19:54 +0000 admin http://www.greenethernet.com/?p=22 With the success of the first two workshops of green communications, the third workshop of green Communications (GreenComm) will be hold in Miami, Florida, USA, 10 December 2010, together with the well-known annual IEEE communications conference, IEEE Global Communications Conference (IEEE GLOBECOM 2010). The last two workshops were hold together with ICC 2009 and Globecom 2009, respectively.
GreenComm03
The major topics that this year’s workshop will focus on the following directions:
Energy-efficient protocols and protocol extensions
- Energy-efficient transmission technologies
- Cross-layer optimizations
Energy-efficient technology for network equipment
- Energy-efficient switch and base station architectures
- Low-power sleep mode
- Exploitation of passive network elements
Energy-efficient communications management
- Architectures and frameworks
- Hierarchical and distributed techniques
- Remote power management for terminals
- Context-based power management
Measurement and profiling of energy consumption
- Instrumentation for energy consumption measurement
- Operator experiences
Energy-efficiency in specific networks
- Mobile and wireless/wired access networks
- Broadband access networks
- Management of home and office networks

The call-for-paper link is here, and the paper submission deadline is Friday, 02 July 2010.

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]]> http://www.greenethernet.com/third-workshop-on-green-communications-2010-greencomm%e2%80%9910/feed/ 0 Energy-minimization in IP over WDM optical network for Green Communications http://www.greenethernet.com/energy-minimization-in-ip-over-wdm-optical-network-for-green-communications/ http://www.greenethernet.com/energy-minimization-in-ip-over-wdm-optical-network-for-green-communications/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:47:56 +0000 admin http://www.greenethernet.com/?p=17 IP over WDM network is a popular network layered architecture for today’s transport network. Using WDM layer’s capacity and IP layer’s intelligence, the combination of the two layers are considered as a cost-effective scheme from the aspects of both network efficiency and operational simplicity. For IP over WDM networks, their power consumption has started to become an interesting research topic.

Recently, a paper “Energy-Minimized Design for IP over WDM Networks” was published in an IEEE/OSA new journal “IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, vol. 1, no. 1, June 2009, pp. 176-186.” Viewing the major power consumption by IP routers, the paper targets to minimize the required number IP router ports subject to all the IP traffic is fully supported. The research results indicate that in an IP over WDM network more than 90% power is essentially consumed by the IP routers, and the components in the WDM layer such as transponders and EDFAs actually consume very little energy. Interestingly, the paper also finds that a power-efficient IP over WDM network is likely to be a cost-effective design viewing that the IP router ports are also the most expensive among all the network components.

Due to the major power consumption from IP router, following the above work recently there are also some studies considering sleeping of IP router ports or tuning down the power consumption of IP router port when the data traffic on the port is low. Theoretically these technologies are possible. They are however highly dependent on the standardization of IP routing protocols. Currently, no mature IP technologies can support router port sleeping (though recently Cisco proposed to shut down a router when the internet traffic is low) and different power consumption at different data rates.

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]]> http://www.greenethernet.com/energy-minimization-in-ip-over-wdm-optical-network-for-green-communications/feed/ 0 Green technologies are hot in OFC/NFOEC 2010 http://www.greenethernet.com/green-technologies-are-hot-in-ofcnfoec-2010/ http://www.greenethernet.com/green-technologies-are-hot-in-ofcnfoec-2010/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:46:01 +0000 admin http://www.greenethernet.com/?p=13 “Green” is a hot “word” in this year’s OFC/NFOEC. Everybody is considering to save energy in the communications areas from the lowest component level to the highest network architecture and protocols.  One of related panel session is Green Optical Networks: From Access to Core, organized by Hans-Martin Foisel from Deutsche Telekom, Germany. “In this workshop different views of carriers, vendors, R&D, standardisation bodies and initiatives on this new telecommunication challenge will be presented, covering:

  • New network design and architectures – allocation of functions
  • Evaluation of different technologies – from routers to optical network elements
  • New approaches to in-house networks
  • Content and processing power allocation – from customer end devices to carrier networks”

The second panel session is “OMD, Is All-Optical Processing Green?” organized by Javier Marti¹, Keith Williams². “The workshop addresses relevant key notes and further discussion on how AOP compares to all electrical processing and to hybrid opto-electronic processing in terms of power consumption efficiency. Figures of merit have to be defined to establish a fair comparison. Key visions on AOP’s opportunities in both ultra-high speed network node equipments (routing, demultiplexing, etc) and high-performance computing will also be addressed.”

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]]> http://www.greenethernet.com/green-technologies-are-hot-in-ofcnfoec-2010/feed/ 0 Cisco Greening Routers http://www.greenethernet.com/good-move-from-cisco-in-green-routers/ http://www.greenethernet.com/good-move-from-cisco-in-green-routers/#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:01:01 +0000 admin http://www.greenethernet.com/?p=11 “A free upgrade to the vendor’s IOS operating system being announced today will let some of Cisco’s enterprise routers handle power management. In the most ambitious cases, the router will team up with facilities-maintenance software to turn down lights on the weekends or move office laptops into battery mode.”…Lightreading .com

Cisco just announced its new IOS software that helps to reduce energy “waste” during weekend by fully or partially turning off its router equipments. It is an important movement that Cisco makes since according to some recent research IP routers are the most power-consuming equipments in the telecommunication networks, and power consumption could become a bottleneck for router capacity further upgrade. 

It was said that the software can work in most of Cisco routers, but the greening targets are those low-end routers due to its large numbers, thereby saving more energy, as well as few connected user groups (it is possible to turn them down fully at weekend). It seems not practical to turn down a core router due to its large amount of transit data traffic. Remember we still surf Internet at home at weekend which needs core routers to be on all the time.   

As an alternative greening solution, it is more practical to slow down a core router in its routing speed when traffic intensity becomes low. For example, a regional router may have low data traffic from mid-night to early morning. To realize this, information on the traffic intensity distribution at different time slots is required and the techniques that can automatically turn down and speed up a router speed is also required.

Interestingly, with the annoucement of new router turning down capability, some people raises an important concern regarding security issues. Would the new software capability prvide a new hacking channel for a hacker to fully control a router and even to disable an entire network by maliciously turning off some controlled routers? This security issue should be carefully evaluated before the new software capability is widely upgraded. 

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]]> http://www.greenethernet.com/good-move-from-cisco-in-green-routers/feed/ 0 Multiple Clock Domain (MCD) processor for energy saving http://www.greenethernet.com/multiple-clock-domain-mcd-processor-for-energy-saving/ http://www.greenethernet.com/multiple-clock-domain-mcd-processor-for-energy-saving/#comments Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:34:18 +0000 admin http://www.greenethernet.com/?p=10 The clock frequency of a chip is related to its energy consumption. The higher frequency is, the more energy will be consumed. In a single-clock chip system, a unique clock is used everywhere for the whole chip, which however may not be energy-efficient because some domain in the chip may actually not require that high frequency. 

To be more energy-efficient, a Multiple Clock Domain (MCD) processor, in which the chip is divided into several (coarse-grained) clock domains, within which independent voltage and frequency scaling can be performed. Based on such architecture, no a unified clock is required for the whole chip, and as a result, energy can be saved for those chip domains that do not need a high frequency. According to some preliminary results reported by a research group from University of Rochester, it is possible to obtain an average energy-delay product improvement of 20% with MCD. Interesting readers may read the following reference:

Energy-Efficient Processor Design Using Multiple Clock Domains with Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling

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]]> http://www.greenethernet.com/multiple-clock-domain-mcd-processor-for-energy-saving/feed/ 0 How much we can save from Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE)? http://www.greenethernet.com/how-much-we-can-save-from-energy-efficient-ethernet-eee/ http://www.greenethernet.com/how-much-we-can-save-from-energy-efficient-ethernet-eee/#comments Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:45:15 +0000 admin http://www.greenethernet.com/?p=9 Research effort and standardization of Green Ethernet have been initialized. One answer that we may be interested in is how much we can save if we adopt the Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) technology for global hundreds of millions of NIC interfaces and Ethernet switch interfaces. According to estimation made by a research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the energy saving will be large although compared to the energy consumption in other usage such as electronics. The following are some typical values estimated for US energy savings from EEE:

  • 1 Gb/s link EEE: $250 to 300 million per year
  • 10 Gb/s link EEE: $40 to 80 million per year

See this documentfor the detail. Although such saving is very small compared to the overall electricity consumption of the whole US, we believe that a small step accumulates a large progress!

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]]> http://www.greenethernet.com/how-much-we-can-save-from-energy-efficient-ethernet-eee/feed/ 0 IEEE 802.3 Energy Efficient Ethernet Study Group http://www.greenethernet.com/ieee-8023-energy-efficient-ethernet-study-group/ http://www.greenethernet.com/ieee-8023-energy-efficient-ethernet-study-group/#comments Sat, 19 Jan 2008 17:51:40 +0000 admin http://www.greenethernet.com/?p=8 IEEE 802.3 Energy Efficient Ethernet Study Group was recently formed by IEEE to work on standardization of saving energy on Ethernet technology. The major idea of energy saving is to reduce power consumption based on the link utilization of Ethernet interface.

For example, for an Ethernet interface that can support 10 Gb/s capacity, when the link utilization is high, then the full speed of data transmission will be carried out. However, if the link utilization goes to below 10% of the full speed, then it is possible to switch the interface speed from 10 Gb/s to 1 Gb/s. In general, 1 Gb/s interface speed consumes much lower power than 10 Gb/s interface speed. For an ideal case, it is also possible to change the power level continuously according to the link utilization.

To realize the transition between different types of interface speed and different power levels, protocols and mechanisms should be developed such that the transition will not cause packets dropped and not be noticed by the upper layer protocols and applications. These are just the objectives of the Energy Efficient Ethernet study group.

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]]> http://www.greenethernet.com/ieee-8023-energy-efficient-ethernet-study-group/feed/ 0 D-Link produces green ethernet products http://www.greenethernet.com/d-link-produce-green-ethernet-products/ http://www.greenethernet.com/d-link-produce-green-ethernet-products/#comments Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:29:23 +0000 admin http://www.greenethernet.com/?p=4 D-Link, one of the largest small router and switch manufacturers, has Green Ethernet switches on shelf recently. Viewing global warming, it becomes essential for human being to save energy consumption. Various efforts have been taken for this purpose. Green Ethernet is one of these good examples. Viewing hundreds of millions of Ethernet interfaces, such an effort is expected to significantly contribute to human being’s efforts on Earth greening.

The major ideas of energy saving in D-Link products include:

  • By keeping on monitoring the activity of an Ethernet interface, the switch can configure the interface to be in “sleeping mode” if there is not data transmission.
  • The Green Ethernet can detect the cable length and transmit data with a power that is sufficient for the data to reach other end. For example, if the cable length is 20 m, the switch interface can use a low power for transmission; however, if the cable length is 100 m, then more power should be turned up for longer distance transmission.

Benefits

  • If computers connected to the switch are turned off, D-Link’s Green Ethernet can save up to 85.65% power.
  • If cable length is less than 20 m, D-Link’s Green Ethernet can save up to 9.3% power used.

Sample power saving table (from D-Link http://www.dlink.com/corporate/environment/dlink-green-ethernet/)-

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