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 and would continue to serve its users under all circumstances, unfortunately, this may not hold due to outages that were once considered very unlikely, e.g., targeted cyberattacks or severe climate events resulting in failure of energy resources. Besides its resilience, energy consumption of the internet is of great concern; it accounts for 10% of global energy consumption, which is expected to rise to more than 20% by 2030. With increasing dependency on digital services, improving energy efficiency at all levels - from hardware to software and from simple IoT devices to sophisticated network infrastructures- 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. With its team members from EE, CS, and M, EERI brings together the required knowledge and expertise to solve an essential problem for tomorrow’s society that needs a robust and energy-efficient Internet to enjoy a connected digital world even in the face of challenges, e.g., emerging with the climate change.

Our project is supported by the Faculty of EEMCS, University of Twente, The Netherlands.

Team: Clara Stegehuis, Harijot Bindra, Lotte Weedage, Syllas Rangel Carneiro Magalhaes, Suzan Bayhan, Viswesh Kendae Ramkumar