Network Evolution for Green ICT: CHTs Light-Era

Yuan-Kuang Tu
Chunghwa Telecom Laboratories, Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. yktu@cht.com.tw

Abstract The rapid technological advancement and invention of various disruptive technologies in the ICT industry present tremendous challenges, but also open new horizons for the telecom operators. To thrive in the highly competitive market in the context of growing threats of climate change, telecom operators not only must incorporate green practices in their sustainability strategy but also share such experiences with other industries, thereby exploring accompanied business opportunities with green ICT. In this paper, we introduce the development trend of green ICT technology and explain how CHT leverages its Next Generation Network (which is called Light-Era) to drive the development and application of green ICT. 1. Introduction Broadband network with high penetration ratio and good quality control will ensure the success of the ICT services. Since more broadband network utilization facilitates the delivery of ICT services, and network with flexible bandwidth provisioning capability ensures suitable performance for meeting the requirements of different service platforms. Moreover, digitalization and fixed-mobile network convergence can expedite service integration and further equip the network with ubiquitous access capabilities. All these network capabilities directly foster the development of ICT services. In order to provide converged digital services and reduce GHG emission, pursuing a green next generation network development with all-optical and all-IP features becomes the objective of developing new ICT services for telecom operators around the world.

2.

Green ICT Evolution With the challenge on global warming, how to use green ICT technology to develop

innovative

energy-saving technology comes into the national plan of many developed countries. According to the study of ITU-T, adopting the integration technology of green ICT not only can reduce its own GHG emissions, but can also help other industries to reduce the GHG emissions they produce. It is forecasted that ICTs could reduce approximately 7.8Gt CO2e, or 15% of total business as usual (BAU) emissions by 2020[1][2]. The proposed energy saving ICT services consist of smart grid, smart buildings, smart motors, and smart logistics. To fully exploit ICT integration for creating innovative services and business opportunities, CHT now puts strong focus on developing green and cloud applications. These two driving forces have a deciding effect on the positioning of green ICT in CHT future roadmap. Currently we define the scope to include network infrastructure, cloud platform and application services. The overall green strategy of CHT is depicted in Figure 1. As illustrated in the figure, with the cloud service platform and next generation transport network as the basis, innovative and on-demand service will be built on its top, and energy saving ICT services for CHTs residential and business customers will then be rendered. For supporting sustainable management of GHG emission, CHT has developed a whole range of energy saving ICT services and systems, such as intelligent Energy saving Network (iEN), intelligent transportation system, fleet management and dispatching, cloud data center services, and mobile yellow pages. Currently, CHT has employed iEN for managing over 1,100 CHT

routing, switching and mobile networks in 2015, and also the overall network efficiency target in 2020.

Figure 1: The Vision of CHT Green ICT buildings and central offices with 31,000 smart meters, and it is estimated that by 2012 the total electricity consumption will be lowered by 12% compared to that of 2007, excluding the additional electricity usage due to business growth. Such saving translates to 110,000 tons of CO2 reduction. When counting in the contribution from households, industry customers and power companies, the electricity conservation can potentially add up to 8.6 to 12.9 mega kilo Watt hour (kWh), which is about 4%-6% of the annual power consumption in Taiwan[3]. As for energy saving from telecommunication network equipment, currently CHT follows the requirements defined by Code of Conduct (CoC) version 3 Tier 2009-2010, and for the next phase we will set our specifications comply with or even beyond CoC ver4 Tier 2011-2012/ Tier 2013-2014. 3. Light-Era Network Evolution It is estimated that the global carbon footprint generated from ICT industries will be doubled over the next ten years due to the exponential traffic increase of information and communication requirements[1]. Figure 3: Light-Era network Evolution When considering general power saving for communication devices, applying new IC fabrication technology is a major approach. A study shows that the new 65 nm technology can save power consumption up to 1/3 as compared to 130 nm. And nowadays the 45 nm Therefore, GreenTouch Consortium is studying new devices, new protocols, new architectures and new networks, aiming to reduce power consumption per bit in every aspect and increase network energy efficiency by a factor of 1000 from current levels by 2020[4]. Figure 2 shows the energy efficiency targets of access, transport, The long-term objective of CHT network evolution, as shown in Figure 3, is to migrate from existing FTTx to a green, end-to-end, all-optical network by applying different kinds of enabling technologies including new IC fabrication, optical cross connect, network management, network consolidation and optimization. Figure 2: Energy Efficiency Target of GreenTouch [4].

technology has been adopted by FTTH GPON system. For those devices which are not required to be running all the time, using power shedding, sleeping, and dozing technology accompany with non-fan heat dissipation design are possible approaches for further saving[5]. In the aspect of network architecture, since transmitting unnecessary traffic will result in the waste of energy, therefore, flattening the network and moving the service nodes and cache systems ahead to the central office to offload the traffic from the core network is a top priority for saving the bandwidth and energy. Considering the enhancement of service capability for supporting future green ICT application, enabling a transparent all-optical network across core, metro and ODN through wavelength layer is the main direction of network development. DWDM and CWDM technology now are employed not only in the core and metro network but also in the access network to alleviate the shortage of fiber loop and increase the capacity of the fiber. Therefore, to provide enough bandwidth using wavelength technology , through WDM PON technology in our case, will be an important measure of constructing a transparent end-to-end all-optical network. Another critical factor closely associated with network service capability is flexible bandwidth provisioning. In order to provide multiple service payloads and support the deployment of ubiquitous broadband network, next generation network will combine the Layer-2 virtualization and granularity technologies with high speed modulation/demodulation and multiple access technologies in Layer-1, such as QAM, DP-QPSK, coherent detection, TDMA/OFDMA, etc. By tightly combining the resources of Layer-1 and Layer-2 networks, interoperation of traffic between Layer-1 and Layer-2 can be fulfilled, thus the transmission capability per Hz can be enhanced and energy per bit (and hence carbon emission) is also reduced. To realize the aforesaid scenario for improving service capability is the main development trend for next generation network. By applying the optical cross connect and GMPLS control plane protocol technologies, integration of network bandwidth resources through energy

flexible provisioning across the electric domain and photonic domain can be realized. Eventually, PTN and WDM PON will be introduced into core and access network, respectively, and the central office will adopt all-optical packet transportation and switching technologies such as colorless, directionless ROADM, OXC and WDM PON OLT to form a new intelligent optical node. Consolidating metro and access network via GMPLS control plan and carrying out bandwidthon-demand provisioning on per user per basis will be the essential performance indices for future network architecture. As mentioned earlier, network and services in the future will become more and more complicated and dynamic. Also, the terminal devices are becoming more intelligent and widely scattered in the homes and the outside plant, therefore dispatching staffs in the field to do provisioning and troubleshooting become energy consuming and cost ineffective. Hence, capabilities to handle the complicate provisioning and real-time trouble-shooting are the keys for CHT Light-Era network management system (NMS). In order to gain energy saving benefits from both customer-side and operator-side, CHT is planning to further integrate Light-Era NMS with customer premises network management system to provide diversified value-added services such as on-demand and real-time rental services through self-service portal. The purpose is to reduce the need for customers to go out to get their telecommunication services. Eventually, CHT will use next generation network management technologies to provision virtualized network and services, and thus reach the goal of energy saving through green network. 4. Conclusions Ubiquitous network expedites the connections between people and helps to fulfill the needs in their daily life or at work. We believe that the success of green network technology evolution will not only promote the green ICT industry and applications, but also will bring a fundamental change to people around the world with brand new energy-saving working and living experiences.

References
1. The Climate Group, Smart 2020 Report: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age, June 2008. 2. NTT Energy & Environment Systems Labs., Green ICT Activities in ITU-T, APEC Green ICT seminar, Aug. 2010. 3. CHT, Green ICT Activities in Chinese Taipei, APEC

Green ICT seminar, Aug. 2010. 4. Bell Labs Seoul, Energy efficiency of mobile communications network, and Research Strategies, 21st High-Speed Network workshop 2011, Jan. 2011. http://plum.hufs.ac.kr/hsn2011/pdf/3-2.pdf. 5. A. Otaka, Power Saving Ad Hoc Report, IEEE 802.3av Meeting, Sept. 2008