Reducing Total ICT Power Consumption with Collaboration Among End Systems, Communication Network and Power Network

The widespread use of ICT equipment is expected to increase the power consumed by ICT rapidly and it is recognized that the energy consumption of ICT equipment themselves (Green of ICT) should be one of key issues. This paper first identifies the need of the collaboration among end systems, the communication network and the power network, in order to reduce the total power consumption by the entire ICT systems. Next, this paper proposes the fundamental policies for the collaboration. One of them is to take any action to keep or put end systems or network devices in the sleep mode as much as possible when all areas have enough amount of available electric power, and to aggregate end systems and network devices in the area which has a largest amount of electric power capacity when multiple areas don´t have enough amount of available electric power. Then, it is proposed to estimate the energy consumption of end systems by measuring and analyzing packets transferred in the network, in order to eliminate the processing load for information exchanges required for the collaboration among end systems and the network.