GreenTouch Initiative Introduction
The GreenTouch™ Initiative is a research consortium whose goal is to increase energy efficiency in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) networks by a factor of 1000 by designing fundamentally new network architectures and creating the enabling technologies on which they are based.
The formation of GreenTouch is motivated by two factors. The first is that energy consumption in ICT networks is increasing in part due to exponential network growth, especially with the explosion of wireless data traffic. Network growth is outpacing equipment efficiency, which is slowing as limits to historical capacity and scaling laws loom. This trend could adversely affect the Internet and the broad energy efficiency benefits that ICT networks and associated smart technologies enable. The second motivation is the urgent need to meet the global challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Every industry must play its part and ICT, at the forefront of technology, can be a leader.
To dramatically reduce the energy consumption of today’s ICT networks, a radical new approach needs to be initiated. Meeting the challenge will depend on collaborative efforts that take advantage of innovation and expertise from around the world. The GreenTouch™ Initiative brings together this expertise in a consortium whose members - leading industry enterprises, entrepreneurs, and researchers from across the ICT community - will work in concert to invent the technologies that can achieve sustainable networks in the decades to come.
The GreenTouch Initiative is stimulated by recent research that identifies a gap between rapid network growth rates today and historical equipment efficiency improvements—a gap that promises to increase over the decades ahead. Technologies in use today, even considering best-case projected energy efficiency improvements, are not expected to be sufficient to check the rate of energy consumption over the long term. At the same time, key technology energy limits associated with existing underlying components of ICT networks (optical, wireless, electronics, routing, architecture, etc.) are still many orders of magnitude below current operating levels.
The vision of GreenTouch is to create ICT networks and technologies that enable a sustainable Internet, and serve as an open, collaborative platform that allows its members to make best use of their expertise and accelerate the creation of these new networks. Within five years, the GreenTouch™ Initiative expects to deliver demonstrations of key components needed to realize a fundamental re-design of networks that dramatically improves their energy efficiency and reduces their overall carbon footprint.
1.Shannon’s Law is a formula used to predict the useful capacity of any communications channel.
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