NETCOM Research Group

TREND is a Network of Excellence, coordinated by Politecnico di Torino, funded by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme.
TREND aims at integrating the activities of major European players in networking, including manufacturers, operators, research centers, to quantitatively assess the energy demand of current and future telecom infrastructures, and to design energy-efficient, scalable and sustainable future networks.
The NoE will integrate and drive towards commonly agreed technical goals the many recent research efforts in energy-efficient networking, laying down the bases for a new holistic approach to energy-efficient networking, investigating effective strategies and mechanisms to reduce energy consumption in current and future networks in general, and the future Internet in particular. We aim at identifying the best answers to the following questions:

• What is the real power consumption of ICT?
• What are the means to best reduce the energy consumption of today’s networks without compromising requirements in network and service performance?
• What are the best suited engineering criteria and principles to actively support energy efficiency along the sequence of network design, planning, and operation?
• What changes in the design of network equipment are necessary in the short and long term in order to obtain the largest possible energy saving
• Which communication and management paradigms and protocols will be able to mediate and ensure the most effective distributed energy control?
• What are the most promising and sustainable long-term approaches to energy efficient networking, assuming that a clean slate network design is possible, and what are potential migration strategies to achieve this?
• What kind of mutually beneficial incentives can be proposed to network operators, service providers, and users, in order to maximize energy efficiency?

The aim of TREND is to establish the integration of the EU research community in green networking with a long term perspective to consolidate the European leadership in the field.