Toward Sustainable Networking
Figure 1: Estimation of expected total annual energy consumption per IT industry in the period 2010–2030. The plethora of data generated by scientific applications, the Internet of Things, social media, and e-commerce fuel large-scale data analytics systems. As a result, data transfer over the Internet has been increasing each year exponentially and has already exceeded the zettabyte scale. With the increased data generation rate, the data movement’s carbon footprint is becoming an overwhelmingly critical problem, especially for data centers and wired access networks. It is estimated that information and communication technologies will use between 8% - 21% of the world’s electricity by 2030 . The estimation of expected total annual energy consumption per different IT industries in the period 2010–2030 is shown in Figure 1. The share of data centers and communication networks in the total IT power consumption is 69%. Among this share, the data transfers alone consume over a hundred