Electronic and optical communication is evermore shaping the industry, economy and our society, and is demanding a permanent increase in network capacities. These developments have been addressed by the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) for more than four decades. ECOC 2015 was held in Valencia, Spain, from September 27 to October 1, 2015. The EIT Digital Innovation Activity EARNI has presented results at this year’s ECOC conference.
The EARNI project tackles energy awareness of communication networks in two steps. In a first step solutions for sustainable energy savings in core network elements of the communication infrastructure have been developed by employing network function virtualization. In a second step the energy efficiency in a virtualization-based network environment has been evaluated and business models for related co-location concepts at telco network production sites with de-centralized electricity sources have been generated and assessed.
At ECOC, Christoph Lange, Dirk Kosiankowski, and Andreas Gladisch of EIT Digital Partner Telekom Innovation Laboratories, presented a use-case-based cost and energy efficiency analysis of virtualization concepts in operator networks. The results of the study show cost and energy-efficiency advantages for the general purpose hardware based solutions employing virtualization concepts as compared to conventional network implementations — as the communication network systems’ utilization as a key factor is improved.
More information is available at ECOC2015.org
