The increase in energy cost and the need to reduce the global greenhouse gas emission to protect our environment are urging researcher to study innovative techniques for the energy consumption reduction in telecommunication networks.

Some studies show that ICT is today responsible for a fraction of the world energy consumption of about 4%, and this percentage is expected to double in the next decade. ICT is expected to play a major active role in the reduction of the worldwide energy requirements, through the optimization of energy generation, transportation, and consumption.

We invite investigators to contribute original research articles in which the impact and the potential exploitation of energy-aware innovative techniques are studied in wired networks. We are particularly interested in articles describing energy-aware network designs and definition of protocols with the aim to reduce the network power consumption. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Design of energy-aware devices with power consumption figures proportional to their utilization level
• Study and evaluation of resource dimensioning strategies to reduce the global consumption due to underutilized devices
• Recent developments in energy-aware routing techniques
• Recent advances of network element virtualization in reducing power consumption
• Design and evaluation energy-aware innovative protocols
• Developments of experimental test beds for the feasibility study of energy-aware technique

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal’s Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jece/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/jece/communications/innop/ according to the following timetable: