Abstract

The Internet traffic is currently continuing to increase at 30% to 40% per year, thus doubling every two years, and leading to expectations of traffic growth by 30x in 10 years and by 1000x in 20 years. A corresponding growth in communication and computing power consumption is clearly not sustainable. In addition, we have recently witnessed significant growth in data collection using IoT devices and systems, as well as growth in data from a wide range of sources including social media, medical, financial and industrial data. Machine learning and AI have helped introduce intelligence in networks and in computing systems. They are expected to continue to help extract value from this huge data, leading to significant increase in computational requirements. There is therefore a need to re-examine the fundamentals of intelligent communication and computing from a sustainability point of view including hardware design, network architecture, software and cloud and fog computing systems.