[CLOSED] Call for Papers: Special Issue on Sustainable Digital Infrastructure

Important Dates

• Submissions Due: 12 January 2023
• Publication: July/August 2023

Modern society is built upon information and communications technologies that have permeated all aspects of our lives. Industries including e-commerce, healthcare, media, and finance are all dependent on network access to data and media services for their daily operations. Taken together, the hardware, software, and organizations that work together to provide network access, data storage, computation resources, and digital services constitute an information and communications digital infrastructure. 

The sustainability of digital infrastructure is of paramount importance.  Digital infrastructure is fast growing in functionality, capacity, and speed. The user numbers and growth over the past decade are phenomenal. Meanwhile, future projections indicate exponential growth in demand for network services and data centers. As is the case with any true societal lifeline, digital infrastructure must be adaptable and available to changes and demands; and be energy-efficient and sustainable. 

Digital infrastructure has a tremendous environmental footprint during the life cycle, from its production, operation, and exit. The operation of digital infrastructure now represents 4% of the world’s total carbon emissions, and its energy consumption increases by 9% per year. Meanwhile, the embedded carbon of digital infrastructure, which is generated during manufacturing and transportation, equals or exceeds the operating cost. With proper recycling, reduce, and reuse, only 10% or less of greenhouse gas emissions are released. Sustainability requires changes from government policy, industry investment, and individual behavior to address the entire lifecycle.

This special issue calls for research on various issues and solutions that measure, evaluate, reduce, and optimize the environmental footprint of the entire life cycle of digital infrastructure. Topics of interest include (but aren’t limited) to the following:

• Social solutions for sustainable digital infrastructure
• Methodologies to quantify embodied carbon and operational energy consumption 
• Methodology to estimate digital waste and its environmental impact 
• Measure, evaluate, and estimate the overhead power consumption for cooling and reliability
• Comparison of various cooling technologies and their environmental footprint
• Measure, evaluate, and estimate the environmental footprint during IT devices manufacturing and/or transportation
• Reduce life cycle resource consumption, pollutants, and emission by designing hardware and facilities 
• Electronic waste reduction, recycle, reuse
• Extended-life hardware 
• leaner architecture/design for software
• Energy-efficient cooling, zero Fresh water cooling, 
• Responsible consumption and production
• carbon footprint of software, service, application
• affordable, reliable, sustainable, and renewable energy for digital infrastructure
• Sustainable water and energy solutions for digital infrastructure
• Challenges and barriers identified to reach sustainable digital infrastructure from user, software application, resource provisioning, hardware, networks, data center facility
• Define efficiency and performance by standardizing a definition of digital power
• Quantify, define, benchmark, and improve digital power

Submission Guidelines

For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, please visit the IC Author Information page. Please submit papers through the ScholarOne system, and be sure to select the special-issue name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal.

Questions?

Email the guest editor at ic4-2023@computer.org.

Guest Editors:

• Rong Ge; Clemson University, USA
• Ziliang Zong; Texas State University, USA