Energy-Aware Internet Routing scheme

[This is the kind of undertaking that CANARIE is funding under its Green IT program and hopes to deploy later this year. Cap and trade is going to dramatically raise the price of energy from coal fired power plants so schemes like this will be essential for the future Internet. Obviously an energy aware routing scheme is ideal for networks where all the nodes are powered by renewable resources. Rather than looking at cost of energy it would look at the availability of energy. Some excerpts – BSA]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/08/17/1413233/An-Electricity-Cost-Aware-Internet-Routing-Scheme
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23248/
An Internet-routing algorithm that tracks electricity price fluctuations could save data-hungry companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon millions of dollars each year in electricity costs. A study from researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the networking company Akamai suggests that such Internet businesses could reduce their energy use by as much as 40 percent by rerouting data to locations where electricity prices are lowest on a particular day.


Modern datacenters gobble up huge amounts of electricity and usage is increasing at a rapid pace. Energy consumption has accelerated as applications move from desktop computers to the Internet and as information gets transferred from ordinary computers to distributed "cloud" computing services. For the world's biggest information-technology firms, this means spending upwards of $30 million on electricity every year, by modest estimates.

Asfandyar Qureshi, a PhD student at MIT, first outlined the idea of a smart routing algorithm that would track electricity prices to reduce costs in a paper presented in October 2008. This year, Qureshi and colleagues approached researchers at Akamai to obtain the real-world routing data needed to test the idea. Akamai's distributed servers cache information on behalf of many large Web sites across the US and abroad, and process some 275 billion requests per day; while the company does not require many large datacenters itself, its traffic data provides a way to model the demand placed on large Internet companies.

The team then devised a routing scheme designed to take advantage of daily and hourly fluctuations in electricity costs across the country. The resulting algorithm weighs up the physical distance needed to route information--because it's more expensive to move data further--against the likely cost savings from reduced energy use. …The team found that, in the best scenario--one in which energy use is proportional to computing--a company could slash its energy consumption by 40 percent. "The results were pretty surprising," Maggs says.

Spiraling energy consumption has become a major concern for the world's largest Web companies; a report published by McKinsey & Company and the Uptime Institute in July 2008 estimates that datacenter energy usage will quadruple during the next decade in the absence of efforts to improve efficiency.

Koomey suggests that spiraling energy costs could encourage some companies to consider radical steps such as rerouting data: "Electricity use is a big enough component of data-center costs that this just might work."