Towards sustainable and reliable networks with LIFETEL

We present the LIFETEL project, whose aim is trying to increase the device lifetime in telecommunication networks by exploiting energy-efficient techniques. In particular, we show that the lifetime of a device might increase when it is put in sleep mode. However, the device lifetime might decrease when power state variations (from sleep mode to full power) occur very frequently. Thus, there is a trade-off between the duration of sleep mode and its frequency. Moreover, we report a lifetime analysis for cellular and backbone devices, showing that the electricity saving may be exceeded by the costs due to the fact that devices fail more frequently compared to the situation in which they are always powered on. Thus, we claim that energy-aware network algorithms should be redesigned in order not to impact and to increase (when possible) the lifetime of network devices.