SustainMe if you can: Sustainable transmission networking design for Big Data

the recent development of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has contributed to an explosive growth of high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets. Consequently, the concept of Big Data has emerged as a widely recognized trend. In order to accommodate these data-intensive services, a sustainable and resilient network infrastructure is essentially needed, as well as some mission-critical transactions are to be assured in the big data environments. However, there is an inherent contradiction involved in simultaneously accommodating both service resilience by over-provision of network resources as well as sustainable transmission by switching off the unnecessary network elements to minimize the overall energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a sustainable transmission network design (SustainMe) approach to enable the routing algorithms seeking the trade-off solutions between service resiliency and energy efficiency. The simulation results have confirmed that SustainMe approach is feasible and its derived routing algorithm for shared backup protection, i.e., SustainMe_SBP is a promising mechanism to resolve above trade-off problem. It consumes much less capacity by only sacrificing a small increase on energy expenditure comparing with other approaches.

1. Introduction

The explosion of information has been a continuous trend since the 1970s, partially being triggered by Internet rapid development and also its associated information and communications technology (ICT) penetrating every part of the world and our daily life. The three Vs (volume, variety, and velocity) from today's big data however are unprecedented. Our world is generating data at a speed faster than ever before. In 2010, 5 Exabyte (10¹⁸ bytes, 1 billion gigabytes) of data had been generated every two days, beyond the total amount of data being generated by human from the dawn of civilization to 2003 [1]. By the year of 2020, over 40 zettabytes (10²¹ bytes) of data is estimated to be generated, replicated and consumed [2]. With these overwhelming amount of data pouring into daily lives, from anywhere, anytime, and any device, we are undoubtedly entering the era of big data.