Researchers at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden) have received funding for a project that aims to increase the energy efficiency of IP-based video networks.
The mobile video traffic is expected to increase by more than 70% per year over the next four years and it requires a lot of resources in the networks in order to deliver the service. The Swedish project is part of a larger European Celtic Plus project with 19 participants from five countries, where most of the participants come from industry. The results will lead to new products launched, such as energy-efficient solutions for the Radio Access Network (RAN), Wide Area Networks (WAN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN).
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According to the Blekinge Institute of Technology, the project has its origins in a number of observations. Energy consumption in video networks and carbon dioxide emissions from video traffic on the internet will increase dramatically in the coming years and exceed those from air traffic in 2020.
The participants of the project address the key challenges related to the reduction of energy consumption in video networks from source to user, i.e. from origin servers (where the video content is encoded and streamed), via Content Distribution Networks, through stem and access networks and finally to the users of the services such as mobile phones.
The project will work with communication architectures, hardware and software design, protocol and core technologies in terminals. Alongside these activities, which are focused on minimizing the energy consumption in video networks of each stage, the project will include the overall activities regarding best software solutions and Eco design and measurements of energy and quality construction.
The expected results will be demonstrated with the help of so-called demonstrators where you can perform relevant experiments and the results are made public. The results will also be provided to relevant standardization organizations.