By Jesse Emspak: Subscribe to Jesse's RSS feed
October 26, 2010 5:04 PM EDT
A team of scientists at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs looking at how much power communications networks use and has found the amount of energy used could cause the next big bandwidth bottleneck.
Dan Kilper is a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs and chair of the GreenTouch Technical Committee, which explores ways to make networks more efficient. He notes that data traffic has grown exponentially, and energy efficiency hasn't kept up.
That means to push more data through and boost bandwidth, the number of routers, switches, and transmitters keeps going up. A communications company can always add more routers, but that process can't go on forever. "At a certain point it either becomes really expensive or the bandwidth just isn't available," Kilper said. He notes that some large carriers have energy bills approaching $1 billion.
In the 1980s, when dial-up connections were the rule (if you had one at all) speeds were typically measured in thousands of bits per second; a typical Internet telephone connection is a thousand times as fast today. "Data traffic has grown something like 40 percent per year," Kilper said. "But energy efficiency has only grown about 20 percent per year."
The 20 percent also assumes state-of-the-art equipment, which is more energy efficient. Most network providers use a mixture of the latest gear and electronic switches that can be decades old. On top of that, the rate of efficiency improvements is slowing to about 10 percent per year.
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The reason for the slowdown is that there are physical limits to what electronic or optical transmission equipment can do, Kilper says. Increasing the rate of data transmission, for example, would involve using shorter wavelengths of light in a fiber optic cable, but using shorter wavelengths requires more energy.
Another factor is wireless usage. Wireless data transmission is much less efficient than transmitting over fiber optic cable. This is because the wireless signal - a radio wave - has to be broadcast in all directions. Wireless signals also lose a lot of power when they go through walls or other obstacles. That means for every bit transmitted, the energy used is much greater, especially for the base stations that transmit the signals to the phones and tablets.
Currently, energy usage of the world's communications amounts to 0.5% percent of the total carbon footprint. That doesn't sound like a lot, but the amount of data transmitted is growing so fast that more routers and switches are needed to handle the load, Kilper says. That will use more energy. "Eventually it could become a real bottleneck," he said.
Also, other sources of greenhouse gases are shrinking. "The number of cars isn't growing exponentially," Kilper said. He adds that while it is important to put the communications network on renewable energy, if the use of the network grows too fast then renewable won't generate enough to support it.
There are solutions, mostly around designing efficiency into equipment from the get-go. Kilper says part of the work the GreenTouch Consortium does is demonstrating technologies to boost efficiency by orders of magnitude.
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