A new global consortium of industry, academic and government laboratories has been launched this week with the aim of making communication networks 1000 times’ more energy efficient than they are today.
If successful, the impact of the consortium – known as Green Touch – would be massive: a thousand-fold improvement is roughly equivalent to being able to power the world’s communications networks, including the internet, for three years using the same amount of energy that it currently takes to run them for a single day.
The thousand-fold target is based on research by consortium leader Bell Labs, which concluded that today’s information and communication technology (ICT) networks have the potential to be 10,000 times more efficient then they are today.
This finding was based on an analysis of the fundamental properties of ICT networks and technologies – including optical, wireless, electronics, processing, routing, and architecture – using established formulas to test their physical limits.
"What distinguishes the Green Touch Initiative is its commitment to a hugely ambitious yet quantifiable goal that is rooted in hard science," said Vernon Turner, senior vice president at industry analyst firm IDC.
"Its global profile and multi-disciplinary approach will accelerate the necessary fundamental rethinking and development of new technologies."
Green Touch has undertaken to deliver a reference
network architecture and demonstrations of the key components necessary to deliver the thousand-fold efficiency improvement within five years. It says the initiative also offers the potential to generate new technologies and new areas of industry.
So far the consortium has signed up leading service providers including AT&T, China Mobile and Telefonica and academic research labs such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE) and the University of Melbourne’s Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES).
It has attracted government and non-profit research institutions including the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) and industrial laboratories, such as Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) and Freescale Semiconductor, as well as Bell Labs itself, which is owned by network equipment company Alcatel-Lucent.
Other mobile network equipment makers, such as Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei Technologies, have not signed up so far, but at its launch this week Green Touch issued an open invitation to all members of the ICT community to join forces to help meet its ambitious target.
Commenting on the initiative, Dr Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy, said: "Truly global challenges have always been best addressed by bringing together the brightest minds in an unconstrained, creative environment. This was what we used when putting a man on the moon and is the same approach we need to implement to address the global climate crisis."
"The Green Touch initiative shows how business can play its part in delivering the low carbon society we are working to achieve," said the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband.
"With Government creating an environment in which innovation can flourish, we welcome industry coming together with academia to create the research, technology and solutions necessary to reduce carbon emissions."