Green Internet

The internet that we access in our day to day lives is not just based on websites, instead they are just the tip of the iceberg. The entire system is driven by routers, switches and most importantly servers. At the moment there are about 8 million servers or data centers around the world, they are responsible for processing and storage of data, and collectively they contribute to over 30% of the total energy consumption of the entire Internet ecosystem. Since most of the energy that is generated at the moment is from non-renewable sources, the Internet infrastructure has a large carbon footprint. So when we are doing simple activities like surfing YouTube or placing order on amazon we are indirectly contributing to climate change by increasing production of CO2. Right now internet is responsible for over 2% of global carbon emissions thus it becomes important to curtail the energy expenditure involving internet.

This growing concern has also encouraged educational institutions, including the Biyani Group of Colleges, recognized as one of the best BCA colleges in Jaipur, to spread awareness about sustainable technology, green computing, and energy-efficient digital practices among students pursuing computer applications and IT-related courses.

Green Internet deals with optimizing energy consumption in internet based services through modifying existing software and hardware capabilities. Since the current data centers lack any sort of power management strategy, their energy expenditure stays high even in case of minimal internet traffic.

The above situation can be easily tackled with the introduction of “Smart Standby” option, which allows the inactive components of the network to be put in standby or a low power state in order to conserve energy. This obviously comes with its own set of issues, mainly being the extra time the hardware takes to wake up, but this is relatively better than keeping the entire system in active mode which consumes twice as much power. To accomplish this we need to optimize the routing table in order to identify multiple paths that allow the passage of data from source to destination, this way we can use only one path & turn off other ethernet ports when they are idle.

Another solution that is being considered to reduce energy consumption is ECONET (low Energy Consumption NETworks) Project. This idea is based on “Dynamic frequency scaling” which uses modified routing hardware and software to handle traffic load using frequency switching.

Websites on their part can adopt better SEO (search engine optimization) practices in order to curtail redundant traffic to their website. Better SEO will help them target only genuine visitors while ensuring there are no unnecessary page views. Collectively this will help in reducing the overall internet traffic as well.

Similarly efficient caching practices can reduce bandwidth consumption while at the same time reducing page load speed. This is accomplished by temporarily saving required data in memory that can be accessed quickly.

To incorporate green internet there needs to be a collective effort between hardware and software developers in order to synchronize different devices across the system so that these energy saving practices.