HANDBOOK ON GREEN INFORMATION AND
COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS
Chapter 8:
Green computing and Communication
Architecture
1Tarik
Guelzim, 1Mohammad S. Obaidat, Fellow of IEEE
1Monmouth
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University
Energy Consumption big issues
Enterprises, governments and institutions at
large have a new important agenda:
 tackle the most challenging environmental issues
 Adopt environmentally sound practices.
Computers and IT infrastructure consume
significant amounts of electricity, placing a big
burden on power grids
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Exponential growth of content
In order to cope up with the increasing demand
for content, every year close to 150,000 new
cellular towers are deployed across the world to
serve around 400 million new subscribers
worldwide.
Meeting this demand is becoming a burden on
energy consumption if we take into consideration
the energy cost which is skyrocketing in the
middle of ever changing geopolitics and
economics around the world.
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Evolving broadband internet
it is no longer an option to focus only on the
technological development of broadband internet
to solve the capacity problem
it is no longer an option to hold on to the current
networking communication protocols that have
reached a road block with regards to their initial
design and features
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Green computing: Hype vs. Standard
To this day, there is more hype than real science
behind the term green computing and
communications which does not have a clear
scientific definition other than its commercial
and marketing connotation.
We need a standard to adopt, which considers
efficiency in communication networks equipment
along with the use of alternative sources of
energy
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Green computing and governmental effort
the study of green communications requires
investigation in many areas such as radio
frequency (RF) hardware, Media Access Control
(MAC) protocols, general networking, material
design and integration of renewable energy
metrics are key elements to properly measure
and provide indicators to allow making better
judgments and strategically plan the growth of
the different communication networks
infrastructure.
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Green computing and governmental effort:
Energy Star 4.0
The program energy star has provided
administrative guidance in reducing energy and
power consumption in devices, appliances both
civil and military.
Energy Star is today one of the first
technologies that were built in and used
inherently in data centers. This because virtually
every computer device today has this technology
incorporated within and natively.
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Green computing and governmental effort:
Energy Star 4.0
The new energy star 4.0 standard regulates
energy performance of external and internal
power supplies.
It also gives power consumption specifications
for different hardware states: idle, sleep and
standby modes.
Computers meeting these requirements will save
energy in all modes of operation.
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Green computing and governmental effort:
The TIP program
The TIP managed green communication program
allows a new solution that addresses the
inherent limitations of the vertically separated
design of OSI layers.
TIP puts the emphasis on combining layer 1 and
layer 2 (physical and MAC) to promote factoring
research effort in one area
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Green computing and governmental effort:
The TIP program
It also promotes using scientifically rigorous
definitions and metrics to allow agencies
quantify and qualify green communication
infrastructure.
More of a framework than a specific technology,
TIP managed programs are being experimented
with in fields such as transportation, medical
systems and finance
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Green computing and governmental effort:
Electronics energy efficiency effort
The electronics industry has put a lot of effort
on improving components efficiency because
they are the basic building blocks of any system.
the Silicon Integration Initiative (S2I) and the
Power Forward Initiative (PFI) are putting
conventions for low power design by
standardizing computer hardware interfaces.
Initial forecasts have shown promising that it is
possible to reduce carbon emission by 50% over
a decade
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Green computing and governmental effort:
Epeat program
The Epeat program, is a comprehensive
environmental rating that helps greener
computer and electronic equipment.
Epeat evaluates electronic products on 23
required criteria and 28 optional ones
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Green computing and governmental effort:
Epeat program
Epeat requirements are grouped into eight
categories:
 Reducing and eliminating environmentally sensitive
materials
 Selecting materials
 Designing for the products end of life (recycling)
 Product longevity
 Energy conservation
 End of life management
 Corporate performance
 Packaging
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Green computing and governmental effort:
Epeat program
Epeat identifies its registered products as
bronze, silver or gold.
 Bronze products meet all 23 required criteria
 silver meets all 23 criteria in addition to at least 14
optional criteria
 Gold class which meet all 23 required criteria in
addition to at least 21 optional ones.
Optional criteria are freely selective by
manufacturers
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ENERGY BASED MONITORING ARCHITECTURE FOR GREEN COMPUTING :
Study of power Consumption in traditional PC architecture
The following graph depicts the energy
consumption by different parts of traditional
computer architecture under normal usage
conditions
DVD
2%
LAN
2%
Intel I/O
controller hub
3%
Fan
2%
GPU
8%
Display
33%
Misc
8%
CPU
10%
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Clock
5%
HDD
8%
15
power
supply
10%
Memory
Controller hub
9%
ENERGY
BASED MONITORING ARCHITECTURE FOR
Energy Monitoring
GREEN COMPUTING :
More than ever, enterprise architects and
deciders need tools such as indicators and
dashboards to allow them successfully forecast
the energy consumption of their future system
(SCADA system, data center … etc).
Based on these forecasts, existing systems can
be optimized.
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ENERGY
BASED MONITORING ARCHITECTURE FOR
Energy Monitoring
GREEN COMPUTING :
Tools / Technique
Usage
Circuit meters
Used in data centers especially in a “rack group”
setup. Circuit meters allow measuring precisely
the energy consumption of a group of server
racks.
Power strip meters
Also used in data centers. Power strip meters
allow a group of interconnected systems.
Plug meter
The plug meter allows monitoring one physical
system.
External thermal sensor
The thermal sensor meter allows a more grained
meter
sensing capability at a floor level.
Internal server thermal
Used in inside a physical system.
meter
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ENERGY
GREEN COMPUTING :
Extensible computing Architecture
BASED MONITORING ARCHITECTURE FOR
 Any green computing architecture today must take into
consideration the environmental impact it incurs.
 IT architect shall aggregate the communication models
with the different metering interfaces from the ground
up to allow a better synergy and effectiveness in terms
extensibility in the long run.
 There is a lack of standards and the segmentation of the
different vendors about the very basic elements of
computer architecture design
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ENERGY
GREEN COMPUTING :
Extensible computing Architecture
BASED MONITORING ARCHITECTURE FOR
The following reusable architectural blocks have
been identified to create extensible green
computing architecture systems:
Issue
Description
Proprietary energy APIs
Most vendors have developed their own APIs to
interface and communicate with metering devices.
Especially in large IT structures, we can find more than
one interfacing API each corresponding to a different
system. This fragmentation phenomenon is similar to
having to use many cell phones and using different
battery charger for each one of them. Inevitably, this
incurs and multiplies additional maintenance cost for the
different architectures.
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ENERGY
GREEN COMPUTING :
Extensible computing Architecture
BASED MONITORING ARCHITECTURE FOR
Issue
Environmental
Description
communication Because there is a heterogeneous metering environment,
bus
system architects attempts to design architectures that
comprise a common communication bus which acts as a
façade
when
communicating
with
the
different
subsystems. Consolidating the communication bus makes
it possible to create better monitoring and reporting
tools.
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ENERGY
GREEN COMPUTING :
Extensible computing Architecture
BASED MONITORING ARCHITECTURE FOR
Issue
Description
Configuration management
Configuration is an important aspect of any system. In large
systems, configuration changes can be costly (eg: number of
backups, number of allowed concurrent sessions, disk quota,
redundancy …) configuration can add work load on the system.
Configuration
management
should
allow
correlating
energy
consumption to configured system profiles and also allow adapting
the system dynamically based on its GHG measurement.
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ENERGY BASED MONITORING ARCHITECTURE FOR GREEN COMPUTING :
Best practices for sustainable green computing system design
The following are few best practices when
designing a green computing architecture:




Understanding business objectives
Understanding power consumption and impact
Developing a monitoring strategy
Build environment sustainability into configuration
management
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ENERGY BASED MONITORING ARCHITECTURE FOR GREEN COMPUTING :
Incorporating Alternative energy in the basic BTS architecture
 Several cellular operators are experimenting with the
use of alternative energy such as wind and solar in
order to operate cellular base stations
 Currently, there are still many base stations in
African countries that run on diesel fuel.
 the Mobile Telecommunication Limited (MTC) and
Motorola have initiated a trial to study the feasibility
of using solar panels to fuel cellular base stations.
 Results have suggested that approximately 659 kg
CO2 could be saved by eliminating the diesel generator
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Green Communication protocols and models:
Cognitive radio
Recent advances and breakthroughs in the area
of cognitive radio have significant potentials
toward green communication.
Cognitive radio, as its name inspires, relies
fundamentally on sensing the surrounding
environment and readapting its behavior on the
different elements collected
The integration of contextual “awareness” in the
wireless spectrum opens a wide range of power
control possibilities
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Green Communication protocols and models:
Cognitive radio
This technology does not however come without
drawbacks, in reality, in today’s setups;
Using less power at the cell level must be
compensated by more power consumption at the
device level resulting in a zero sum gain
It is clear that an interdisciplinary method in
the telecom field between cell tower and cell
phone handheld manufacturers must be put into
place to push forward an inter-layer approach.
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Green Communication protocols and models:
First order radio model (FORM)
The first order radio model has been developed
in an attempt to solve energy inefficiency issues
with sensor networks
 Under normal conditions, FORM diminishes energy dissipation
between the transmitter and the receiver nodes.
 Energy dissipation per bit in nano-joules
• 50 nJ/bit
 Transmitting a message of k-bits a distance d radio
expends
 The receiving end radio expands as such
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Green Communication protocols and models:
Direct communication protocol (DCP)
This protocol is used for routing in combination
with low energy dissipation model such as FORM.
Using DCP.
Each sensor sends data directly to the base
station.
Only the base station receives messages
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Green Communication protocols and models:
Minimum transmission energy protocol (MTE)
Nodes use intermediate nodes for routing to
send data to the base station. The intermediate
nodes path is chosen as such that it minimizes
the energy amplifier equation (using FORM
model).
This protocol has few drawbacks:
 if relied on minimizing the amplifier equation, all nodes
close to the base station will be chosen as
intermediate nodes since they do not require a large
amount of signal amplification to send data to the
base station.
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Green Communication protocols and models:
Clustering
The clustering technique tries to marry the
benefits of both DCP and MTP.
Under clustering, nodes are organized into
clusters with a “delegate” base station.
These base stations then transmit consolidated
data to the main base. This technique works best
if the base station is not an energy constrained
node
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Green Communication protocols and models:
Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH)
LEACH improves on the previously described
Clustering algorithms by distributing cluster
information and by adding local processing to
reduce global communication.
In addition, LEACH adds random rotation of the
cluster heads to maximize and extend the
system life time.
This protocol is broken into different phases:
setup and steady state phase.
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Green Communication protocols and models:
Wireless Network Distributed Computing (WNDC)
The current traditional wireless model empowers
a “selfish” node behavior that is solely based on:
 performance
 quality of service
 capacity in the surrounding areas that are covered by
its cell.
The requirements of each base station must
rather be coordinated within the overall network
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Green Communication protocols and models:
Wireless Network Distributed Computing (WNDC)
The ability to apply such concepts in the wireless
domain remains a challenge given the disruptive
characteristics of the wireless channel.
Distributed Design tradeoffs involve the
following:
 A cross system interaction between the application
layer and the communication layer.
 Simplifying the interaction complexity in the
underlying networking, radio and physical layers.
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Green Communication protocols and models:
System Power Consumption (SPC)
System Power Consumption is yet another
communication model that aims at lowering
energy consumption.
Recent research has proposed to limit the
energy consumption by adapting modulation
techniques, coding and radiated power.
This research works on the same energy
optimization track as the PA model described in
a previous section.
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Green Communication protocols and models:
Network Topology and Operation
One of the leading telecom companies, Huawai, is
leading the way to provide energy efficient base
transceiver station (BTS) by including PA
improvement along with operational strategies
At the core of their technology is the Dohertyenhance technology that is combined with a
custom power amplification chip to elevate
amplifier efficiency to 45% instead of the
current 33%.
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Green Communication protocols and models:
Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA)
Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) provides the
sensing and dynamic reconfiguration capabilities
that leverage the use of spectrum white holes;
this allows supporting opportunistic transmission
without requiring extra spectrum bandwidth.
It offered solutions to many issues:
 Offering real time processing using low clock
frequency operation.
 Reducing RF accessing needs since this is a power
consuming factor.
 Processing multiple instructions with each clock cycle.
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DESIGNING GREEN COMPUTING MODELS:
Green processor design
Green computer design aims at reducing the
environmental impact of computing by adopting
new technologies and using new techniques and
materials while balancing performance with the
economic viability of the green solution
Some research suggests that 50% energy
consumption gain can be achieved by only
decreasing the chip frequency by 15%. Other
initiatives concentrate on dividing the cache into
segments and only enabling i.e. powering them
when needed.
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DESIGNING GREEN COMPUTING MODELS:
Greening data centers
The continued rise of the internet and web
applications is driving the rapid growth of data
centers.
We can improve data centers efficiency by:
 Using new energy –efficient equipment,
 Improving air flow management to reduce cooling
requirements,
 Investing in energy management software
 Adopting environmentally friendly designs for data
centers
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DESIGNING GREEN COMPUTING MODELS:
Greening data centers
Some of currently deployed measures in the
industry are:
 Energy conservation: Companies like HP, IBM, SprayCool a,d
Cooligy are developing technologies such as liquid cooling and
nano fluid cooling into servers and racks. Others use green
energy sources such as hydrogen fuel cells as alternative green
power sources.
 Virtualization: this is a key strategy to reduce data center power
consumption. With virtualization, one server can host multiple
virtual servers that use the computing resources efficiently
because computing resources (CPU clocks cycles) are often not
used at their maximum capacity.
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DESIGNING GREEN COMPUTING MODELS:
Green super computing
Data center supercomputers provide an
unparallel computational horse power for solving
scientific and engineering problems
This horse power comes at the expense of power
consumption not only to run the super computer
but also to cool it down.
supercomputing focus on performance and
“occasionally” cost/performance where
performance is defined as speed
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DESIGNING GREEN COMPUTING MODELS:
Green super computing
Green destiny is the first major instantiation of
the supercomputing in small spaces project.
Green destiny has put into perspective two types
of super computer architectures:
 A low-power supercomputer that balances
performance and power at system integration time.
 A power-aware supercomputer that adapts power to
performance needs when the system is running.
 Both of these approaches aim at reducing power
consumption and improving energy efficiency.
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DESIGNING GREEN COMPUTING MODELS:
Web services based SaaS and the Cloud
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a buzzword in
the realm of cloud computing.
The basic idea is that we can reduce the number
of applications deployed in data center by
consolidating similar applications by SaaS
providers
There are many major players in the market
today such as salesforce.com and amazon.com
who offer SaaS services at a low cost.
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DESIGNING GREEN COMPUTING MODELS:
Web services based SaaS and the Cloud
The major keys benefits of Web Service based
SaaS can be summarized as follows:
 Cost (money) effectiveness.
 Time effectiveness.
 Focus on business needs rather than the construction
and maintenance of IT infrastructure.
 Gain immediate access to state of the art innovations
rather than maintaining legacy infrastructure.
 Gaining instant benchmarking data based on
community feedback of SaaS.
 Save energy by reducing storage, computational and
processing power at the servers
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DESIGNING GREEN COMPUTING MODELS:
Green Operating systems (OS)
There are many ways to optimize a client
environment to save energy and reduce
environmental impact.
Recent operating systems have made a clear
design cut between the different layers that
make up an –general purpose- operating system
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DESIGNING GREEN COMPUTING MODELS:
Green Operating systems (OS)
There are many ways to optimize a client
environment to save energy and reduce
environmental impact.
Recent operating systems have made a clear
design cut between the different layers that
make up an –general purpose- operating system
Application services
Operating systems services
All physical hardware services
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DESIGNING GREEN COMPUTING MODELS:
Green Operating systems (OS)
Each layer has its own services and provides
services to the above layer.
Each layer has to work in coordination with
other layers.
This layering model, allows dividing the “green”
requirement into three scopes, each one is
handled by the contributor of the subpart in the
final OS.
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Conclusions
In this chapter we have summarized major
research and technical orientations in the field
of green communications and networks.
These orientations focus on:






Energy efficient protocols
Energy efficient signal processing methods
Energy efficient Adaptive algorithms
Energy dissipation in computation
Energy efficient network architectures
Alternative energy sources
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Conclusions
Given the multidisciplinary nature of green
communications that ranges from material
engineering to system architecture,
breakthroughs in this field are arriving at a fast
pace.
Nevertheless, implementing sustainable
practices and strategies in businesses, products
and services is also as important as their
engineering counterparts in order to achieve this
milestone.
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Conclusions
Ignoring power consumption as a design
constraint of IT systems will result in
supercomputing systems with very high
operational cost and small reliability.
This is to say that future petaflops machine will
require 75 to 100 MW to power up and later cool
down which can be estimated in several millions
of US dollars in a span of a year.
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Conclusions
Green IT is a hot topic today and will continue to
be an important issue for several years to come.
To foster green IT, we need to understand the
key environmental impacts arising from IT as
well as the major issues that need to be
addressed.
IT infrastructure, products and services,
operations and applications must turn into
“green” sustainable forms.
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Conclusions
The challenges of green IT are immense.
Nevertheless, recent development indicate that
the IT industry is aware and has the “will” to
tackle these issues given the enterprise business
orientations are not impacted by such measures,
at least not at the same instance in time.
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Thanks for your
attention!
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