Towards greener digital infrastructures for ICT and vertical markets

Abstract

One of the most important challenges of this century will be to minimise as much as possible the energy consumption of the worldwide digital infrastructure to have a significant contribution on our emissions of CO₂ reduction since energy consumption and emission of CO₂ are directly linked. Therefore, after an introduction (part 1), in part 2 of this paper, we will describe the status of the worldwide production of electricity, the contribution of information and communications technology (ICT) in terms of electricity consumption, and the identification of the critical network segments that can have a significant environmental impact. In part 3, we will focus on the data centres and core services that represent important network segments responsible for the largest emission of CO₂. In part 4, we will address the access and aggregation part, which represents the second important network segment to optimise. Part 5 will focus on the home networking and enterprise. And before an estimation of the energy savings obtained when adopting the innovations proposed, the impact of the vertical market will be discussed in part 6. Finally, the conclusion (part 7) will summarise the results and perspectives will be proposed to complete the analysis.