The SwiTching And tRansmission (STAR) project is sponsored by EPSRC.

Summary

The Internet power consumption has continued to increase over the last decade as a result of a bandwidth growth of at least 50 to 100 times. Further bandwidth growth between 40% and 300% is predicted in the next 3 years as a result of the growing popularity of bandwidth intensive applications. Energy efficiency is therefore increasingly becoming a key priority for ICT organizations given the obvious ecological and economic drivers. 

In this project we adopt the GreenTouch energy saving target of a factor of a 100 for Core Switching and Routing and believe this ambitious target is achievable should the research in this project prove successful. A key observation in core networks is that most of the power is consumed in the IP layer while optical transmission and optical switching are power efficient in comparison, hence the inspiration for this project.