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Abstract—With the increasing adoption of mobile, fixed-power devices, energy consumption emerged as a vibrant research topic. Several techniques and mechanisms have been proposed aiming at increasing the actual operation time of networked devices. Yet, signaling across the protocol stack, on the one hand, and a very slow increase in battery capacities, on the other, still compel heavy users to charge their mobile devices on a daily basis. Smartphones, for example, can stand idle for hundreds of hours, but can remain operational only for a handful of hours. Laptops perform abysmally worse. This one to two orders of magnitude difference in performance is astonishing. Meanwhile, the power consumption of large server farms, content distribution network (CDN) sites, Internet exchanges, telecommunications operators, and home networks increase significantly every year. Given that energy efficiency was never a design or operational consideration for the protocols of the TCP/IP stack, researchers worked towards making every layer (from the application to the physical layer) more efficient; TCP energy-efficient variants/alternatives, for example, were a very active field earlier this decade). Nevertheless, most proposals were effectively point solutions; holistic approaches dictate great changes in network architecture and design philosophy. Cross-layer solutions that followed were also tied to the current network architecture invariants. This talk argues that a large part of the problem could be addressed by changing the way information is produced, stored, and delivered to its intended recipients. Today, by and large, information is hosted by particular nodes: the information retrieval model is based solely on end-to-end connections. Devices are either connected to the Internet (and can access information), or they are not connected at all. There is no middle point. Occasionally-connected devices are considered somehow "handicapped" and need special treatment. In fact, being sporadically-connected could be one of the keys to an order of magnitude decrease in energy consumption. The current binary operation mode causes extensive signaling, especially in the case of mobile and wirelessly-connected nodes, which introduces a whole range of energy consumption inefficiencies. Recent research efforts towards re-architecting the future Internet adopt a content- or information-centric approach. In this paradigm, the network does not connect nodes with links and processes via end-to-end connections, but information consumers with information producers and distributors. This talk reviews salient prior work along with recent proposals for a new network architecture that takes into consideration energy consumption from the outset and assumes multiaccess wireless connectivity as the norm, not the exception.
Workshop web site
Tags—Future Internet, 4WARD
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Last updated: 18.08.2008