Comparing Communication Protocols within an Enterprise Network for Carbon Footprint Reduction

Abstract

We present a comparison study between communication protocols relative to carbon footprint within enterprise network. The comparative study focuses on three factors; the communication protocols (transmission control protocol (TCP) and user datagram protocol (UDP)) of the transport layer, the quality of service (QoS) offered by the transmission line and the data encoding schemes in the physical layer. The high quality transmission lines produce low carbon footprint, whereby the maximum capacity of transmission line is utilized to reduce the number of transmissions. The carbon footprint of an enterprise is estimated from the power spectrum of the transmitted packets through Manchester coding. The enterprise is often susceptible to heavy transactions at the backbone, thereby producing more carbon footprint. Consequently, the carbon footprint reduction within the enterprise is formulated as an optimization problem, wherein the given single enterprise is synthesized into suitable clusters by integrating the heavily communicating nodes together. The simulation results demonstrate that a typical single enterprise comprising of 100 nodes with 4 GB backbone traffic when both the UDP and TCP utilize high capacity link produces 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 molecular assembly manages to produce 64.5% reduced annual carbon emission than the initial network.