Jeong KimPresident, Bell Labs Alcatel-Lucent

In the lifespan of our planet, the age of humans has occupied but a brief pulse of time. Yet during thissliver of presence, humankind has faced a cascade of natural and self-made perils—a quantity exceededonly by the resolve to ultimately overcome them and grow in both prosperity and happiness. Howeverin recent decades, it has become clear that our very footprint on planet Earth has unleashed yet anotherthreat, one that if left unchecked could compromise the sustainability of those achievements and inflictstill further long-lasting consequences.

Like many other socially responsible companies, we embrace our common obligation to broadlyconfront this threat, and in particular the one dimension of it most closely associated with our ownindustry: the discharge of carbon into our atmosphere. The electricity required to power the networksthat feed our ever-expanding appetite for mobile, video, and other formats of information translatesinto a corresponding increase in our industry’s carbon footprint—in both absolute and relative terms.That global demand is sufficiently robust so as to overwhelm any energy efficiencies thus far introducedinto the latest generations of networking infrastructure. In addition to the surging costs associated withthat increased energy requirement, there is a comparable increase in costs associated with managingthe heat build-up generated by that infrastructure.

We recognize that a solution will require the expertise and collaborative energies of a wide range ofleading research centers across the ICT industry. This is what motivated us in Bell Labs to take the lead informing the GreenTouch™ consortium; a group of leading university, industry, and institutional scientistsdedicated to the goal of delivering the architecture, specifications, roadmap, and demonstrations of keycomponents needed to reduce ICT energy consumption per bit by a factor of 1,000 from current levelswithin five years.

Across our own R&D organizations, we have prioritized green initiatives and dedicated the considerableresearch resources from multiple disciplines of science and engineering that will prove so fundamentalto our helping to meet the GreenTouch goal while also reducing operational costs. But beyond this, webelieve that our research in these areas will be critical for defining the kinds of networks that willincreasingly serve as the foundation for our information-dependent cultures and societies.

In the pages that follow, I invite you to gain insights from some of our current green-related research,and to engage with the authors in that spirit of collaboration that will be so essential if we are tosuccessfully meet this challenge before us.