Comparing Communication Protocols within an Enterprise Network for Carbon Footprint Reduction

The enormous growth in enterprise networks such as cloud computing and social networking increase the network traffic, thereby contributing considerably to the total carbon emission within the network. In this paper, we present a comparison study between transportlayer communication protocols relative to carbon footprint within enterprise network. The comparative study focuses on three factors: the transport layer communication protocols (TCP and UDP), the QoS offered by the transmission line, and the data encoding schemes in the physical layer. The QoS of the transmission line and the number of transmissions contribute significantly to the total carbon footprint generated by the enterprise network. The carbon footprint is estimated from the power spectrum of the transmitted packets through Manchester coding. The carbon reduction at the backbone is of prime importance, since the enterprise is often susceptible to heavy transactions at the backbone. We have formulated the carbon footprint reduction within the enterprise as an optimization problem, wherein the given single enterprise is synthesized into suitable clusters by localizing the heavily communicating nodes together. The simulation results demonstrate that a typical single enterprise comprising of 100 nodes with 4 GB generated backbone traffic when both the UDP and TCP utilize high capacity link, produce low and nearly equal volumes of carbon. However, the difference becomes significantly high with the link offering poor QoS, in which, UDP based transmissions produce 14% less carbon than TCP based transmissions. The optimization within the molecular assembly algorithm manages to produce 64.5% reduced annual carbon emission than the initial network. Network Protocols and Algorithms ISSN 1943-3581 2013, Vol. 5, No. 1 www.macrothink.org/npa 112