Green Touch issues call to arms to eco-warriers

Gee Rittenhouse (pictured) and Ben Verwaayen have been instrumental in setting up Green Touch

Last month’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen ended badly, with acrimony between the largest greenhouse gas emitters, China and the US.

However, their widely criticised failure to hammer out a deal may have acted as a catalyst for the communications industry to develop carbon reduction schemes. And an initiative called Green Touch, launched last week by Bell Labs, under the auspices of parent company Alcatel-Lucent, is one such possible solution.

Set up by 15 members of the global network communications industry and several academic institutions, the plan hopes to be able to reduce the power used by the ITC industry by a thousandfold in five years.

Bell Labs’ head of R&D, Gee Rittenhouse, said that his researchers calculated the amount of energy needed to power today’s networks was 10,000 times less than the amount actually being used, but that they would aim to reduce power a thousandfold because they felt this was possible within five years.

Alcatel-Lucent chief executive Ben Verwaayen explained that with vast numbers of new users on global networks using high-bandwidth video, and accessing large datasets, all ISPs would be looking to reduce their energy use.

Wireless technology
A significant driver for this energy consumption reduction would be efforts to improve wireless technology, according to Rittenhouse.

And independent charity Global Action Plan’s Green IT Partnership manager Cameron Green said it made sense to target wireless for power reduction, owing to its increasing dominance as a way of accessing the internet. He also said it explains why mobile operator China Mobile had signed up as a founding member.

“China Mobile has 500 million subscribers, so its energy bills must be huge. It will be looking to reduce energy consumption from a cost perspective,” he said.

Rittenhouse explained that the cost savings in wireless may come from making broadcasts more directional. “If you have an antenna that broadcasts to a wide area but is picked up by a user who is very local, 99 per cent of the energy is not used, so we are looking at whether we can reduce this wasted energy,” he said.

However, he added that if ISPs were to use smaller cells with a narrower scope for broadcast, some of the energy saved would have to go towards providing backhaul for the additional cells that such an approach would require. This kind of trade-off is the type issue Green Touch will investigate, Rittenhouse said.

Shannon’s law
Another way in which energy reduction could be achieved would be by using Shannon’s law. This defines the “theoretical maximum, error-free, data transfer rate over a communications channel” and could be used to deploy complicated coding algorithms to substantially reduce power use in a network. However, as Rittenhouse pointed out, you would need more powerful computers to evaluate those codes, and that would require more energy. “So again you are talking about trade-offs, this time between circuits and coding,” he said.

After five years the group hopes to have demonstrated the enabling technologies for the proposed reduction in energy, as well as to have integrated some technologies into operator and enterprise networks. It should also have created hardware blueprints to be rolled out to the wider industry.

“I would expect the industry to run very, very quickly with this by that point,” said Rittenhouse.

Alcatel-Lucent chief executive Verwaayen said: “Achieving this on our own is difficult, but if we can get open collaboration and the best brains to work on reducing that energy consumption, spectacular things can happen.”