Theoretical and Data-driven Approaches for Energy-efficient Networks(TIDENET)

The ICT industry is, quite rightly, criticized for its rapidly rising energy usage, contributions to CO2 emissions and for not taking its responsibility to the environment seriously. The sector causes world-wide CO2 emissions comparable to the airline industry. This increasing energy consumption of the ICT infrastructures has a direct and negative impact on the environment, the service operators, the manufacturers, and the society. The goal of TIDENET is to create a less power consuming ICT sector. The project explores and exploits both theoretical and practical approaches. Theoretical studies are needed in order to develop thorough understanding of how energy is used in communications systems. Such understanding will help find new solutions to increased energy efficiency in these systems. In our practical approach we implement and validate these solutions to understand how energy is saved in real systems. We have been investigating the fundamental relationship between the smart power grid (including electric vehicles) and communications networks, including communication with and among vehicles. We have also utilized our knowledge on edge computing and software defined wireless networking for our research in this area. Our work covers a number of applications including sustainable data centers where enhancing the energy efficiency for big data analytics is the main goal. Recently, we have exploited techniques such as deep learning and blockchain to make accurate predictions of power generation and consumption, to enhance cyber physical security of the smart grid, and to jointly optimize allocation of computation and communication resources in mobile edge computing networks. With our studies in this project, won six best paper awards in reputed international scientific conferences. The goal of TIDENET is a win-win situation, where CO2 emissions are reduced by minimizing energy consumption, and at the same time cost is reduced for mobile operators and mobile subscribers both locally and globally. The outcomes of this project will reduce energy consumption, CO2 emissions and radio signal pollution from the ICT industry. The project will enhance Norway's research reputation as well as competitiveness in eco-sustainability. Please refer to the following link for our recent activities and results: http://folk.uio.no/yanzhang/projects/TIDENET.html

The ICT industry is, quite rightly, criticized for its rapidly rising energy usage, contributions to CO2 emissions and for not taking its responsibility to the environment seriously. This increasing energy consumption of the ICT infrastructures has a direct and negative impact on the environment, the service operators, the manufacturers, and the society. The goal of the FRINATEK project TIDENET is to develop the green communication networks of the future. The project will tackle three key challenges: (1) it will include thorough theoretical studies to understand the fundamental tradeoffs between energy usage and communication quality (e.g., QoS and secrecy level); 2) it will propose untraditional approaches to adaptive power management in communications networks. This includes addressing hard optimization problems with game-theoretical methods; and 3) the project will explore social concepts to design intelligent power saving schemes. At the end of the project the developed techniques will be integrated into a proof-of-concept testbed, where significant energy usage reduction will be demonstrated. The project will be executed in tight collaboration with world-class researchers from Europe, USA and Asia. The completion of one PhD student and one postdoc will provide highly sought after competence in green communication networks.