Introducing Energy Awareness in the Cognitive Management of Future Networks

The current circumstances on a worldwide level urgently impose to exploit technology in order to reduce environmental pollution, CO2. emissions and waste. The current technologies and the provisioned evolution steps take into consideration these facts and contribute to achieve greener footprint. This paper describes technologies as important elements in the design of Energy-aware Future Networks. They comprise Energy-aware Opportunistic Networks and Traffic Engineering schemes that can be seen as two major extensions towards future networks in the wireless infrastructure-less and wired backhaul/core segments, respectively. In parallel, the role of Cognitive Management Systems for enhancing these technologies with intelligent features that can assist in the optimization of network performance goals, including green targets, is also pointed out. Several simulation results evince how the proposed schemes can contribute in achieving greener footprint in the context of Future Networks.