Project description
Reducing the ecological impact of ICT service delivery
The expanding presence of ICT technologies and services, coupled with the proliferation of their infrastructure and heightened production demand, has underscored the urgency of introducing and embracing greener and sustainable processes. This is essential for mitigating emissions and pollution. The EU-funded EXIGENCE project is dedicated to reducing the overall pollution generated and energy consumed in ICT service delivery. It will take a holistic approach, addressing the entire ICT ecosystem, rather than focusing solely on individual providers. The project aims to develop a comprehensive system for assessing data related to ICT service delivery and energy consumption. It will then provide optimisation solutions to policymakers and individuals, thus contributing to a more sustainable ICT industry.
Objective
EXIGENCE is committed to reducing the overall energy consumption and carbon-footprint of ICT service delivery. Contrary to existing approaches, which address individual domains, EXIGENCE takes on the behemoth by improving the energy consumption and considering the type of energy sources used by not only the individual tenants in each heterogeneous domain of the ICT value chain but the energy/carbon footprint of the entire ICT ecosystem.
The project will conceive a system and define suitable metrics and inter-domain data exposure means for assessing end-to-end ICT service delivery. The insights from this work will be formulated as pivotal sustainability requirements and brought into authoritative standardization bodies (3GPP and ETSI) so as to shape the emerging next-generation mobile system (6G).
We conceive a functional architecture encompassing all stakeholders and translate this into suitable interfaces, metrics and mechanisms to enable energy metering during service delivery at each tenant level and aggregate these readings into an overall ICT service energy metric, which we make available to all participants. We provide suitable optimisations techniques for each individual tenant. To further improve energy efficiency during the end-to-end ICT service delivery, we devise incentive-compatible user involvement mechanisms. Overall, EXIGENCE commits to reducing the energy consumption/carbon footprint of ICT services by a factor of three for typical services (e.g. video streaming), by a factor of five for challenging services (e.g. NPN), and bringing the CO2e to Zero for some realistic use cases that will be studied in the project.
With a prototype of the conceived system, we validate the developed solutions to demonstrate the achieved improvements. The outcomes and insights derived from the project will be disseminated at suitable venues and further used to influence the burgeon of the 6G system with participation in relevant standardisation efforts.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.2.4 - Digital, Industry and Space Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-JU-RIA - HORIZON JU Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
D02 XE80 LOWER DUBLIN
Ireland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.