Green Communication Networks (GCN)

The energy and climate crisis remain current and relevant issues in our society, despite many energy savings already implemented in many areas of daily life. Communication networks especially pose a challenge, due to the continued increase in network usage, growing data volume, increasing requirements of network services, and ever increasing number of end devices in our networks. Future communication networks, 6G in particular, need to increasingly consider ecological sustainability aspects in addition to traditional network quality metrics, like Quality of Service (QoS), and the Quality of Experience (QoE). Environmental sustainability is already defined as a key value indicator (KVI) for the development of 6G, aiming to provide climate-neutral and energy-efficient operation to future networks, while retaining current quality standards. Quantifying the energy consumption, energy efficiency, CO2 emissions and sustainability indicators (KVIs), must be derived for all parts of communication networks.

However, metrics for sustainable communication networks are often lacking or are inadequate for various application areas and networks. Consequently, this research group is focused on defining such metrics and models to enable the quantification of energy efficiency, sustainability, as well as QoS and QoE in communication networks. defining these metrics requires a detailed understanding of all network quality aspects, in addition to a comprehensive understanding of the underlying systems.