Minimizing the Energy Footprint of Global Data Movement with GreenDataFlow

It is estimated that the number of devices connected to the Internet will be four times as high as the world population in 2022, and the global IP traffic will reach 4.8 zettabytes per year. The increased number of users and data rates do not only require increased network bandwidth and achievable data transfer throughput but also result in an increased energy footprint. The annual electricity consumed by the global data movement is estimated to be more than 200 terawatt-hours at the current rate, costing more than 40 billion US dollars per year. According to the same statistics, the share of the US in this global data movement and in its energy footprint is approximately 20%. This fact has resulted in a considerable amount of work focusing on power management and energy efficiency in hardware and software systems and more recently on power-aware networking. The majority of the existing work on power-aware networking focuses on reducing the power consumption on networking devices (i