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 literature”), from academic as well as industrial sources, is contributing 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 segments 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 emphasis 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 architecture, 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 foundation of research directed towards controlling the Internet’s energy consumption.