Zero Carbon Access Networks
Description
Bill St. Arnaud:
"With zero carbon access networks, whether wired or wireless, the fundamental assumption is that all active network devices will have to move to the edge of the network, where the power is located. The core of the network, as much as possible, needs to be made up of passive devices. The best analogy is to apply the concept of BitTorrent discovery and routing to the physical infrastructure.
Considerable progress has been made in this space with wireless mesh networks. For optical networks RPON (Reverse Passive Optical Networking) is the proposed solution where all active lasers and DWDM equipment is located at the edge of the network on the customer’s premises integrated with, or powered by their solar panels. Not unlike wireless networks, multiple independent optical paths are maintained with nearby neighbors. In fact, integration of both wireless and wired networks would make sense to achieve greater density and throughput.
All forwarding and routing would be done at the edge with multiple overlapping distributed forwarding tables using a Hadoop based routing table.
Solar powered, low powered GSM and Wifi is a well established technology. Solar powered Raspberry PI GSM,FTP and routing engines are also freely available.
Ultimately higher aggregation and routing would make sense at traditional routing nodes as described in section 6.0
This architecture can also be used on backbone networks as well, where the core backbone is only made up of optical amplifiers and wave selection switches." (http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2013/02/high-level-architecture-for-building.html)