Students Identify Approaches to Reducing Network Energy Consumption

The concept of energy-efficient networking has become popular in recent years. Besides growing sensitivity to ecological issues, interest also stems from economic needs. As such, electrical and computer engineering students Wisam Zaben,  Jennin Shehab and Leen Hanouneh examined the subject of networking devices on the Internet, in their graduation project “Greening the Internet.”

In the project supervised by professor Mohammad Hussein, the students explored ways to put network links to sleep while still maintaining network connectivity,  by reading the topology of the network and network graphs. The three students implemented their work on network data sets, and took the outcome results and compared them with the amount of reduced energy consumption.

The students concluded that “sleeping” appears to be the appropriate way to maximize energy conservation on the internet, by redesigning the hardware of networking equipment to allow its software to go to sleep.