Sustainable Development of Networks and Telecommunication Services

Abstract

Sustainable development of telecommunication network is related to the provisioning of new architectures and services aware of current and future needs of people. This reaserch work wants to analyze aspects related to the sustainable development in general and their relation with the telecommunication networks and services in order to help designing the Internet of the future. The first step has been related to a deep analysis on the sustainable development and the work carried on by the United Nations in the last few years. This concept has been enriched thanks to the work done by the Internet Society which identified gaps to be bridged from different perspectives. The main goal of this work is to explore technological aspects that could help out the future Internet and the telecommunication world to meet requirements supporting the sustainable development. The gaps identified during this analysis were the followings: High costs, High environmental impact, Low flexibility and scalability, Low reliability and relisilience. The main results of the research activity here discussed is the proposal of a new high level architecture that integrates new kind of devices and embraces the network as a whole. To properly support the sustainable development, four technological drivers have been individuated and they are briefly listed below: Energy efficiency of network devices, Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Cloud and Fog computing