Time for a "Greener" Internet

Abstract

It is anticipated that the Internet traffic will continue to grow exponentially for the foreseeable future, which will require ever-growing energy (electricity). Since a lot of the Internet traffic growth comes from predictable services (such as video) there is a huge potential for decreasing future Internet energy requirements by synchronizing the operation of routers and scheduling traffic in advance, thus reducing complexity (e.g., header processing, buffer size, switching fabric speedup and memory access bandwidth speedup). Today, scheduling and synchronizing large-scale data transfer operations can be easily achieved by utilizing a choice of tens of global time sources, freely available on earth and in space. In a way, this manuscript shows how to "trade" global time for electricity utilized by the global Internet.