A case for the development of data standards for reporting projections of growth in the Internet’s energy consumption

Abstract

A growing body of literature (the “energy litera-ture”), from academic as well as industrial sources, is contrib-uting to knowledge about the growth of the Internet’s energy consumption. Despite a general consensus on trends, there exist significant differences in the values published as well as in the scope of the network under study. A separate body of literature (the “architecture literature”) deals with the architecture of the Internet. The architecture literature describes the various seg-ments of the Internet, ranging from the first mile to the trans-oceanic backbones that link continents. It also describes current- and next-generation architectures of these segments, with empha-sis on the first- and second-mile technologies. A rationalisation of the architecture literature is attempted. This is used to facilitate a comparison of a sample of works from the energy literature. Works in this sample forecast energy consumption of metro-area implementations built according to the current-generation archi-tecture, that presents at least two aggregation stages before the level of the network-network-interface at the service provider’s core. The rationalisation is presented as a recommendation for authors to facilitate the application of their work as the founda-tion of research directed towards controlling the Internet’s ener-gy consumption