Funding: UT-internal
Running Period: 2021-2025
Staff: Dr. Clara Stegehuis, Dr. Suzan Bayhan (CS), Dr. Harijot Bindra (EE)
Ph.D. students: Lotte Weedage, Syllas Rangel (CS), Viswesh Ramkumar (EE)
ABSTRACT
The Internet forms the backbone of the world's most crucial services, ranging from education to healthcare and from transportation to communications. Given its critical role in the continuity of everyday services, it is paramount to understand and improve the resilience of the internet. In contrast to the general perception that this critical infrastructure is always there, outages such as targeted cyberattacks or severe climate events resulting in failure of energy resources may cause the network to fail. Besides its resilience, the energy consumption of the internet is of great concern, as it will accounts for 20% of global energy consumption by 2030. With our increasing dependency on digital services, it becomes paramount to decrease the energy footprint of the internet and to increase its resilience against possible energy outages.
In this context, EERI aims at both understanding and improving the energy efficiency and resilience of the internet. We will design energy-efficient hardware and control, resource allocation algorithms considering both the wired and wireless communication networks with optimization strategies that make the internet resilient against failures. While hardware is typically investigated in electrical engineering; internet protocols/algorithms in computer science, and resilience analysis in mathematics, designing an energy-efficient and resilient Internet requires input from all three EEMCS disciplines to work jointly.