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Green Touch: Moving towards new green telecommunications networks
Bruno Sportisse © Inria / Photo G. Maisonneuve
Convinced of the importance of developing more environmentally friendly technologies, Inria is a founding member of the Green Touch initiative, launched on Monday 11 January by Alcatel-Lucent and its Bell Labs research units. This consortium has set itself the ambitious goal of achieving a 1000-fold reduction of energy consumption on telecoms networks by developing, within the next five years, the technologies and components that will form the basis of the green networks of tomorrow.
Bruno Sportisse, Director of Technology Transfer and Innovation, explains why Inria has joined other academic and industrial organisations in becoming a member of the Green Touch consortium.
Is developing more environmentally friendly technologies a priority for Inria?
Bruno Sportisse: "Nowadays, there is a need to take into account sustainable development issues when designing ICTs, and in particular to reduce their carbon footprint. Optimising the energy consumption of new technologies is therefore a crucial factor in the development of a sustainable digital society, and particularly for the future of the Internet. Several Inria project-teams, such as ASCOLA, CEPAGE, DART, MAESTRO, MASCOTTE, MESCAL, NECS, RESO, RMOD and RUNTIME, are conducting research that touches upon these issues. Some are involved in multi-partner projects. MASCOTTE, for example, is a participant in the ANR DIMAGREEN project, which aims to design and manage green, low-energy networks, while MESCAL and RESO are involved in the GreenNet collaborative research initiative, which is developing energy-efficient software architectures for large-scale distributed systems."
What are the benefits of a consortium like Green Touch?
Bruno Sportisse : "For projects of this scale, a comprehensive approach is required, encompassing all the relevant scientific and technological aspects, from the physical components to the software used to design and manage the network. By thoroughly examining every link in the chain, and aiming to create a more energy-efficient network (the network is not currently designed to be energy-efficient), experts from Bell Labs estimate that there is potential for energy consumption to be reduced several times over. In bringing together stakeholders from all fields of digital technology, the Green Touch consortium enables just such a comprehensive approach.
It is also key to take an Open Innovation approach, with joint analysis and joint commitments from industrial groups and public-sector research bodies. Designing infrastructures for the digital society requires a pooling of efforts. And that is exactly the strategy adopted by the consortium, which comprises both leading academic institutions (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University Wireless System Labs, CEA-LETI, Inria, etc) and industrial heavyweights (Samsung, Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, China Mobile, Samsung, Telefonica, etc.), and remains open to other members should they wish to join."
The initiative also consolidates our strategic partnership with Alcatel-Lucent, doesn't it?
Bruno Sportisse: "Indeed it does. Alcatel-Lucent is a strategic partner for the Institute and we have been working productively with them for a number of years. Since July 2008, when we launched our shared laboratory dedicated to the Internet of the future and autonomous mobile networks, we have embarked upon a number of other key projects together. Alcatel-Lucent was one of the driving forces behind the ICT Labs project, which was selected last December by the EIT, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology."
Keywords: Alcatel Lucent Networks Project GREEN-NET Project DIMAGREEN Telecoms Bruno Sportisse
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