Mathieu Lemay

Leveraging green communications for carbon emission reductions: Techniques, testbeds, and emerging carbon footprint standards

Green communication systems and, in broader terms, green information and communications technologies have the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. This article provides an overview of two issues related to achieving the full carbon abatement potential of ICT. First, green communications research challenges are discussed, notably as they pertain to networking issues. Various initiatives regarding green ICT testbeds are presented in the same realm in order to validate the green performance and functionality of such greener cyber-infrastructure. Second, this article offers a description of ongoing international efforts to standardize methodologies that accurately quantify the carbon abatement potential of ICTs, an essential tool to ensure the economic viability of green ICT in the low carbon economy and carbon credit marketplace of the 21st century.

Converged Optical Network Infrastructures in Support of Future Internet and Grid Services Using IaaS to Reduce GHG Emissions

With the rapid and growing volume of green house gas (GHG) we may soon cross a tipping point where there may be dramatic climatic catastrophes such that governments will be forced to order the shutdown of coal powered electrical production or mandate carbon neutrality across all sectors of society. On the other hand, in the event of such a development, the future Internet and Grid infrastructure may become absolutely essential for communications and a replacement for travel and for the delivery of critical services such as health, education, research, etc. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) produce 2%-3% of the worlds GHG emissions through the consumption of electricity largely produced by coal plants. This rate of GHG is expected to double in the next few years and is clearly unsustainable. Therefore it is critical that any future Internet and Grid infrastructure be designed not only to survive, but also be sustained, through an age where no additional GHG emissions will be allowed. Converged optical networks, Grid and cloud services hosted at zero carbon renewable energy sites using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) where each network and computer element is represented to a user as a configurable virtual service will allow for the deployment of what are often referred to as ldquofollow the sun or follow the windrdquo optical network and Grid architectures where the network and Grid topology and Grid resources availability and location are constantly changing depending on local availability states of the wind or sun.

OpenFlow supporting inter-domain virtual machine migration

Today, Data Center Networks (DCNs) are re-architected in different new architectures in order to alleviate several emergent issues related to server virtualization and new traffic patterns, such as the limitation of bi-section bandwidth and workload migration. However, these new architectures will remain either proprietary or hidden in administrative domains, and interworking protocols will remain in-process of standardization for a time longer than the usually required time to market. Therefore, interworking cloud DCNs to provide the federated clouds is a very challenging issue that seems to be potentially alleviated by a software-defined networking (SDN) approach such as Openflow. In this paper, we propose a network infrastructure as a services (IaaS) software middleware solution based on Openflow in order to abstract the DCN architecture specifities and instantly interconnect DCNs. As a proof of concept we implement an experimental scenario dealing with virtual machine migration. Then, we evaluate the network setup and the migration delay. The use of the IaaS middleware allows automating these operations. OpenFlow solves the problem of interconnecting heterogeneous Data Centers and its implementation offers interesting delay values.

Powering a Data Center Network via Renewable Energy: A Green Testbed

Todays information and communications technology (ICT) services emit an increasing amount of greenhouse gases. Carbon footprint models can enable research into ICT energy efficiency and carbon reduction. The GreenStar Network (GSN) testbed is a prototype wide-area network of data centers powered by renewable energy sources. Through their work developing the GSN, the authors have researched fundamental aspects of green ICT such as virtual infrastructure, unified management of compute, network, power, and climate resources, smart power control, and a carbon assessment protocol.

Ontology-Based Resource Description and Discovery Framework for Low Carbon Grid Networks

Using smart grids to build low carbon networks is one of the most challenging topics in ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) industry. One of the first worldwide initiatives is the GreenStar Network, completely powered by renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and hydroelectricity across Canada. Smart grid techniques are deployed to migrate data centers among network nodes according to energy source availabilities, thus CO2 emissions are reduced to minimal. Such flexibility requires a scalable resource management support, which is achieved by virtualization technique. It enables the sharing, aggregation, and dynamic configuration of a large variety of resources. A key challenge in developing such a virtualized management is an efficient resource description and discovery framework, due to a large number of elements and the diversity of architectures and protocols. In addition, dynamic characteristics and different resource description methods must be addressed. In this paper, we present an ontology-based resource description framework, developed particularly for ICT energy management purpose, where the focus is on energy-related semantic of resources and their properties. We propose then a scalable resource discovery method in large and dynamic collections of ICT resources, based on semantics similarity inside a federated index using a Bayesian belief network. The proposed framework allows users to identify the cleanest resource deployments in order to achieve a given task, taking into account the energy source availabilities. Experimental results are shown to compare the proposed framework with a traditional one in terms of GHG emission reductions.

Enabling infrastructure as a service (IaaS) on IP networks: from distributed to virtualized control plane

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is considered a prominent model for IP based service delivery. As grid and cloud computing have become a stringent demand for todays Internet services, IaaS is required for providing services, particularly private cloud, regardless of physical infrastructure locations. However, enabling IaaS on traditional Internet Service Provider (ISP) network infrastructures is challenging because IaaS requires a high abstraction level of network architectures, protocols, and devices. Network control plane architecture plays therefore an essential role in this transition, particularly with respect to new requirements of scalability, reliability, and flexibility. In this article we review the evolutionary trend of network element control planes from monolithic to distributed architectures according to network growth, and then present a new virtualization oriented architecture that allows infrastructure providers and service providers to achieve service delivery independently and transparently to end users based on virtualized network control planes. As a result, current ISP infrastructures will be able to support new services, such as heavy resource consuming data center applications. We also show how to use network virtualization for providing cloud computing and data center services in a flexible manner on the nationwide CANARIE network infrastructure.

Environmental-aware virtual data center network

Cloud computing services have recently become a ubiquitous service delivery model, covering a wide range of applications from personal file sharing to being an enterprise data warehouse. Building green data center networks providing cloud computing services is an emerging trend in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry, because of Global Warming and the potential GHG emissions resulting from cloud services. As one of the first worldwide initiatives provisioning ICT services entirely based on renewable energy such as solar, wind and hydroelectricity across Canada and around the world, the GreenStar Network (GSN) was developed to dynamically transport user services to be processed in data centers built in proximity to green energy sources, reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions of ICT equipments. Regarding the current approach, which focuses mainly in reducing energy consumption at the micro-level through energy efficiency improvements, the overall energy consumption will eventually increase due to the growing demand from new services and users, resulting in an increase in GHG emissions. Based on the cooperation between Mantychore FP7 and the GSN, our approach is, therefore, much broader and more appropriate because it focuses on GHG emission reductions at the macro-level. This article presents some outcomes of our implementation of such a network model, which spans multiple green nodes in Canada, Europe and the USA. The network provides cloud computing services based on dynamic provision of network slices through relocation of virtual data centers.

Renewable energy provisioning for ICT services in a future internet

As one of the first worldwide initiatives provisioning ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) services entirely based on renewable energy such as solar, wind and hydroelectricity across Canada and around the world, the GreenStar Network (GSN) is developed to dynamically transport user services to be processed in data centers built in proximity to green energy sources, reducing GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions of ICT equipments. Regarding the current approach, which focuses mainly in reducing energy consumption at the micro-level through energy efficiency improvements, the overall energy consumption will eventually increase due to the growing demand from new services and users, resulting in an increase in GHG emissions. Based on the cooperation between Mantychore FP7 and the GSN, our approach is, therefore, much broader and more appropriate because it focuses on GHG emission reductions at the macro-level. Whilst energy efficiency techniques are still encouraged at low-end client equipments, the heaviest computing services are dedicated to virtual data centers powered completely by green energy from a large abundant reserve of natural resources, particularly in northern countries.

Toward a Zero-Carbon Network: Converging Cloud Computing and Network Virtualization

Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is one of the most challenging research topics in ICT because of peoples overwhelming use of electronic devices. Current solutions focus mainly on efficient power consumption at the micro level; few consider large-scale energy-management strategies. The low-carbon, nationwide GreenStar Network in Canada uses network and server virtualization techniques to migrate data center services among network nodes according to renewable energy availability. The network deploys a follow the sun, follow the wind optimization policy as a virtual infrastructure-management technique.

High Performance Digital Media Network (HPDMnet): An advanced international research initiative and global experimental testbed

Currently, support for digital media is one of the fastest growing requirements of the Internet as demand transitions from services designed to support primarily text and images to those intended also to support rich, high quality streaming multi-media. In response to the need to address this important 21st century communications challenge, an international consortium of network research organizations has established an initiative, the High Performance Digital Media Network (HPDMnet), to investigate key underlying problems, to design potential solutions, to prototype those solutions on a global experimental testbed, and to create an initial set of production services. The HPDMnet service is being designed not only to support general types of digital media but also those based on extremely high resolution, high capacity data streams. These HPDMnet services, which are based on a wide range of advanced architectural concepts at all layers, provide a framework for network middleware that allows non-traditional resources to enable new network services, including those based on dynamically provisioned international lightpaths supported by flexible optical-fiber and optical switching technology. These HPDMnet services have been showcased at major national and international forums, and they are being implemented within several next generation communications exchanges.