The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old

Abstract

Today, the ICT industry has a massive carbon footprint (a few percent of the worldwide emissions) and one of the fastest growth rates. The Internet accounts for a large part of that footprint while being also energy inefficient; i.e., the total energy cost per byte transmitted is very high. Thankfully, there are many ways to improve on the current status; we discuss two relatively unexplored directions in this paper. Putting network devices to “sleep,” i.e., turning them off, is known to be an efficient vector to save energy; we argue that harvesting this potential requires new routing protocols, better suited to devices switching on/off often, and revising the cor- responding hardware/software co-design. Moreover, we can reduce the embodied carbon footprint by using networking hardware longer, and we argue that this could even be benefi- cial for reliability! We sketch our first ideas in these directions and outline practical challenges that we (as a community) need to address to make the Internet more sustainable.