Power provisioning for a warehouse-sized computer
Proceedings of the 34th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Communications technology has great potential for helping other industries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, given the relentless growth of demand for communications services, telecommunications providers will need to transition to more energy-efficient technology in order to limit their own environmental footprint. Here we focus on priority-setting for the transition process. We introduce a method for statistically inferring the electricity consumption of different components of the installed base of telecommunications equipment, while avoiding the high cost of performing direct measurements. Our method relies only on databases of installed equipment in central offices, together with aggregate electricity consumption per office. It takes advantage of inter-office variation in installed equipment to partition per-office electricity consumption by major equipment type. When applied to a collection of 3,918 central offices of a major U.S. telecommunications provider, our approach reveals the (previously unknown) network-wide energy consumption of each major type of equipment. In particular, we find that electricity consumption is dominated by Class-5 telephone switches, which account for 43% of aggregate consumption, and which should therefore be a primary target of central office electricity conservation efforts.