Digital infrastructures like cloud computing and large data centers, DLT/blockchain platforms, Edge Computing platforms, and data transmission networks, have a severe impact on the world wide energy demand, accounting for 2% of the world´s total energy use in 2020. The amount of Internet traffic and the demand for data services are rising exponentially, which leads to an increased demand for scalable data storage and dissemination. The nature of data transmission is changing rapidly, as more traffic flows through mobile devices and networks. Digitalization in data-intensive healthcare storage, video streaming, online gaming and emerging digital technologies are likely to boost the demand for data center and network services even higher.
Digital infrastructures additionally have a profound effect on the personal data security and privacy guarantees, as well as on transparency and verifiability of data handling. We aim to address these issues, e.g., by applying the popular blockchain paradigm to data storage in integrated digital infrastructures. This direction is explored by the recently established Blockchain Lab.
We investigate sustainable applications of networked digital infrastructure as well as sustainability of the digital infrastructure itself. In particular, we focus on efficiency: we do not want blockchain systems or distributed AI applications to waste unnecessary energy, and we want humans to seamlessly cooperate with machines and with each other in a virtual world with minimal latency. High performance and low energy networking often go hand in hand. Other important aspects of sustainability that we focus on encompass transparency and innovation in infrastructures and digitalization in healthcare and well-being, as mentioned in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Our areas of interest:
The ND group applies research results obtained in the above areas to real-life systems and applications by collaborating with many prominent international and national companies and organizations.
ND also contributes to Internet and communication standards via, for instance, the IETF, the IRTF and ITU.T.