  Reduction of unnecessary energy consumption is becoming a major concern in
wired networking, because of the potential economical benefits and of its
expected environmental impact. These issues, usually referred to as "green
networking", relate to embedding energy-awareness in the design, in the devices
and in the protocols of networks. In this work, we first formulate a more
precise definition of the "green" attribute. We furthermore identify a few
paradigms that are the key enablers of energy-aware networking research. We
then overview the current state of the art and provide a taxonomy of the
relevant work, with a special focus on wired networking. At a high level, we
identify four branches of green networking research that stem from different
observations on the root causes of energy waste, namely (i) Adaptive Link Rate,
(ii) Interface proxying, (iii) Energy-aware infrastructures and (iv)
Energy-aware applications. In this work, we do not only explore specific
proposals pertaining to each of the above branches, but also offer a
perspective for research.
