Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), announced Monday the formation of a global consortium whose mission is to reduce the amount of power consumed by communications networks by a thousand – or roughly being able to run them for three years on the same amount of energy they currently consumer in one day.
Called Green Touch, the initiative is open to all members of the information and communications industries. Bell Labs has recruited founding members from industry, academia and government research groups as well as service providers, including AT&T, China Mobile, Swisscom and Telefonica.
The first meeting of the consortium will take place in February and will be dedicated to establishing the organization’s five-year plan, first-year deliverables, and member roles and responsibilities.
While this is not the first green initiative in the communications industry – nearly every service provider and vendor has one – it is the first to address the problem from the ground up, asking the question, “What is the minimum energy requirement to run a network?”
Initiatives to reduce energy consumption in existing networks usually target 15 to 20 percent improvement annually. “That will continue and we can see that clearly has an impact on our industry,” said Gee Rittenhouse, vice president of research at Bell Labs and consortium lead, in an advance interview with xchange. “The problem that we face is data traffic is growing much faster than that so the overall energy consumed in the network will likely increase over time even with the energy reductions in our equipment.”
The efficiency goal for the initiative is based on initial research from Bell Labs that showed wireless networks could be 10,000 times more energy efficient while wireline networks – without the inefficiencies of the radio network – have the potential to be 1 million times more energy efficient.
When we completed that study, we realized a couple of things,” said Rittenhouse. “When you actually optimize a network for power, the resulting network looks very different. We recognized then that what we are really talking about essentially is reinventing the network. ...In addition to that, we recognized that there were a lot of key technologies that were required and actually had yet to be invented.”
This future network calls for the development of codes – means of extracting signals out of noise – for a lot of little radio cells, circuits that operate at a much smaller voltage, and optics that are more efficient. “Those are several of these things of which the basic understanding exists today, but applying it in terms of energy and taking it to the limit has not been fully demonstrated,” he said.
To illustrate the difference between today’s network and the future energy efficient network, Rittenhouse uses the example of the human brain compared to a computer. While they can do the same calculations, the brain only dissipates 20 watts of energy. To extend the metaphor further and into grayer territory still – we still don’t know exactly how the brain works or how the future network works.
