Section: Application Domains

Green networking

Wireless technologies are mature enough to see, in the near future, the rise of high bandwidth ubiquitous connectivity, at least in dense urban centers. This evolution puts into focus the en- ergy consumption of communication infrastructures, stressed by one of the main societal and economical challenge that developed countries have to tackle. As a matter of fact, one can find in the literature studies pointing out the environmental impact of telecommunications, e.g. the Internet, and claiming that no future infrastructure will be deployed without a serious investiga- tion on its energetic footprint.

Two legitimate viewpoints foster distinct research fields. On the one hand, the societal view- point aims at minimizing the system-wide energetic footprint which necessitates multiobjective analysis and optimization. On the other hand, the viewpoint of telecommunication operators, public institutions or corporate companies assimilates the energetic consumption to an exploita- tion cost weighted by the cost of electricity being traded off by other economical variables (incomes, installation cost, scale effect on costs, etc.) when addressing dynamic adaptation of the network to the stochastic behavior of clients.

In particular, this application field is fundamentally different from traditional network designs as stated by preliminary studies, since non-linear (and seldom non-continuous) cost functions are involved. Furthermore, other new energy-aware optimization methods have to be considered (e.g. for survivable sensor networks), since some global metrics have to be accounted for.