A review on the recent energy-efficient approaches for the Internet protocol stack

The reduction of energy consumption has become a key research area for the information and communication technology (ICT) industry, due to economical, environmental, and marketing reasons. While the environmental direction aims at minimization of greenhouse gas emissions by enforcing the usage of renewable energy in the ICT industry, economical and marketing directions lead researchers to design low-power components or develop and enhance energy-saving protocols without an impact on the level of the performance. With the steady increase in the cost of energy, the expanding number of energy-hungry components and widespread usage of ICT industry, most of the protocols that have become an integral part of our lives but are yet developed without any energy constraints in mind in the past will need to be restructured or developed again. For this reason, researchers are studying on all layers of the Internet protocol stack to develop energy-efficient protocols and algorithms. This paper reviews recent approaches for energy efficiency studies for each layer in the Internet protocol stack from the physical layer to the application layer. It is expected that with the deployment of current research output, the studies performed at each layer will result in significant energy savings for the ICT industry which in turn will have a positive impact on our lives for their economical and environmental results.