Green Communications: Principles, Concepts and Practice

Chapter 20Energy Efficiency Standards for Wireline Communications

Konstantinos Samdanis¹, Manuel Paul², Thomas Kessler³ and Rolf Winter¹

¹NEC Europe Ltd, Heidelberg, Germany

²Deutsche Telekom AG, Berlin, Germany

³Deutsche Telekom AG, Darmstadt, Germany

20.1 Introduction

Given the exponential growth of network traffic and increasing network infrastructure for achieving higher speeds and capacity, energy consumption of networks has become a significant concern, from a business as well as environmental perspective. Besides the need for sustainable and interoperable solutions, regulatory initiatives are influencing standardization efforts enforcing energy conservation for network equipment and telecommunication systems. The majority of standardization bodies have nowadays adopted an energy efficiency or green agenda to address energy-saving mechanisms applicable to a wide set of network equipment. Among the most noticeable efforts by Standards Development Organizations (SDO) and consortia for energy efficiency in wireline networks are the ones from International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), Alliance for Telecommunication Industry Solutions (ATIS), and Broadband Forum (BBF).

The Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T, a United Nations ...