Telecom’s New Challenge: Energy Efficiency

This is my first blog entry for xchange magazine. I plan to provide regular insights and opinions relating to challenges that are relevant to service providers. Topics will vary from changing business models; how to monetize the network; running services inside the network; and challenges of cost per bit vs. value per bit; to comments on industry events, regulatory activity and many more.

This first entry highlights telecom’s most recent challenge ─ energy efficiency. It is remarkable how fast power consumption shifted from being a complete afterthought to a prominent decision criterion in selecting equipment for new deployments. Here in the U.S., it may still be a trivial issue (the only commendable exception being Verizon, which recently announced it will require vendors to reduce power consumption by 15 percent by next year and published an energy efficiency requirements specification document), but in the rest of the world, power efficiency and “green” networking are in the spotlight. At the SAINT conference in Turku, Finland (July 28-31), I participated in the very first workshop and panel discussion focused on power consumption in future telecom networks. From the many contributions and conference papers, it is clear that power requirements are escalating, calling for urgent and drastic action to stem the tide.

Rising energy costs and increasingly rigid environmental standards work in tandem to draw attention to the “power efficiency” aspect of data networking. Governments and corporations around the world are tightening energy and emissions budgets, thus creating demand for new, energy-aware generations of telecom equipment.

In response, telecom vendors are starting to label their offerings as “green” and “environment friendly.” But one important detail is often missing: verifiable data to support these (marketing) claims that separate the pretenders (aka “greenwashers”) from the real contenders. Measuring energy consumption and efficiency of telecom equipment is not an easy task, as it depends on many parameters such as technology, performance and applications. This mix of parameters makes it challenging to estimate the actual energy efficiency — a situation clearly undesirable for service providers, customers, government agencies and vendors.

However, the increased scrutiny on power consumption has spurred activity across commercial companies and government agencies to define a set of energy efficiency criteria for qualification and homologation purposes. This is a very important first step to define the benchmark for future improvements in energy efficiency.

Designing efficient network platforms is the second step required to create energy-aware networking platforms. To become energy efficient, a networking platform has to be meticulously designed to achieve advanced functionality within a limited energy budget. At the highest level, energy-related improvements in network equipment design can be classified as organic and engineered. Organic efficiency improvements are commensurate with Dennard’s scaling law, which states that every new generation of network silicon packs more performance in a smaller energy budget. Engineered improvements refer to active energy management, including, but not limited to — idle state logic, gate count optimization, memory access algorithms, I/O buffer reduction, and so forth.

It is interesting to note that some passive (organic) and active (engineered) energy management enhancements are directly aligned with building competitive network systems, while others are not. For example, better density, integration and heat management allow for building faster and denser platforms — a clear differentiator in the market. On the other hand, dynamic power management proportionate to an instant load does not fundamentally affect platform density or capacity. However, such intellectual property is part of a pool of promising technologies that may dramatically improve energy efficiency. As the return on investment is not always material and being a pioneer is challenging and very often expensive, large corporations and government agencies will have to step in and support the research activities for developing more energy efficient technology.

Luc Ceuppens is senior director, head of product marketing, High-End Systems Business unit at Juniper Networks (JNPR).

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