clean-IT: Towards Sustainable Digital Technologies

Traffic in communication networks continues to grow at 30% to 40% per year, thus doubling every two years and increasing potentially by factors of 30x in 10 years and 1000x in 20 years. This talk introduces the need for energy efficiency in communication networks, data centres and edge/fog processing. It discusses the use of renewable energy, energy efficiency through network topology optimisation, through optimum placement of content and content caching and through progressive and edge processing. It outlines how virtualisation can be used for optimum resource sharing to improve energy efficiency. It describes a cloud, fog, core and access network and IoT testbed. The talk examines the IEEE Sustainable ICT initiative and nine new IEEE standards it has introduced in this area. Finally, the talk concludes with a summary of the potential of ICT in reducing the carbon footprint of other areas including mobility, manufacturing, agriculture and buildings.

Prof. Jaafar Elmirghani is Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of IET and Fellow of Institute of Physics and was PI of the £6m EPSRC Intelligent Energy Aware Networks (INTERNET) project, 2010-2016. He is Co-Chair of the IEEE Sustainable ICT initiative, 2012-present. He was awarded the IEEE Comsoc 2005 Hal Sobol award, 3 IEEE Comsoc outstanding technical achievement and service awards (2009, 2015, 2020), the 2015 GreenTouch 1000x award, IET Optoelectronics 2016 Premium Award for work on energy efficiency and shared the 2016 Edison Award with a team of 6 from GreenTouch for joint work on the GreenMeter. His work led to 5 IEEE standards on energy efficiency: IEEE P1925.1, IEEE P1926.1, IEEE P1927.1, IEEE P1928.1 and IEEE P1929.1. He has published over 550 technical papers.