November 7th, 2016
In the October 2016 IEEE Communications Magazine, the President’s Page states that “ComSoc is leading the IEEE Initiative on Green Information and Communication Technologies (Green ICT) and the IEEE Standards Association is helping to support this initiative. To start with, we have had two very successful Rapid Reaction Standardization Activities on this topic, one in the UK last November, and one in Chicago this past June. Just recently, nine new standards proposals have come out of our engagement with the Green ICT initiative, including a couple that could have a significant impact on the 5G initiative mentioned above through producing some practical ideas about how to limit the power consumption of 5G wireless devices. In this way, we can see how synergy can be achieved between and among ComSoc industry initiatives.”
The Green ICT initiative has thus made significant progress in the Standards arena as 9 Projects Authorization Request (or PARs) were defined in two different workshops. These 9 PARs were submitted for approval of the creation of Standards Working Groups within IEEE and, as of October 2016, they have all passed the first stage of the approval process and are awaiting the second stage by the end of this year. As such, Working Groups (WG) for these 9 standards could be created in early 2017.
The initiative at that point will be soliciting participation in these WG to ensure that the broadest representation of competence is available to them. The PARs deal namely with methods to calculate and access the greenhouse gas emissions that result from the telecom infrastructure and that, in particular, can be mitigated by virtual machine migration and placement. They also deal with energy efficiency at the signal waveform level and on the transmission systems and the processing of big data.
Eventually lead by the IEEE Standards association when launched next year, this activity is presently coordinated by Dr. Jaafar Elmirghani, Dr. Thierry Klein and Dr. Charles Despins, all co-chairs of the Green ICT Initiative.
The development of these 9 PARs speaks eloquently to the commitment of the initiative’s volunteers as well as to the broad scope of the Green ICT theme.
The 9 PARs approved by ComSoc and submitted for approval to the IEEE Standards Association are namely:
PAR 1: Standard for a method for calculating anticipated emissions caused by virtual machine migration and placement
PAR 2: Standard for a method to calculate near real-time emissions of information and communication technology infrastructure
PAR 3: Standard for computation of energy efficiency upper bound for apparatus processing communication signal waveforms
PAR 4: Recommended practice for developing energy efficient power-proportional digital architectures
PAR 5: Standard for Energy Efficient Dynamic Line Rate Transmission System
PAR 6: Standard for a Functional Architecture of Distributed Energy Efficient Big Data Processing
PAR 7: Standard for Services Provided by the Energy-efficient Orchestration and Management of Virtualized Distributed Data Centers Interconnected by a Virtualized Network
PAR 8: Standard for a Mechanism for Energy Efficient Virtual Machine Placement
PAR 9: An Architectural Framework for Energy Efficient Content Distribution
A description of each of these PARs can be found in the STANDARDS section.