Despite their huge differences, the Internet and the power grid share similar delivery patterns in the sense that the Internet delivers information from one place to another and the power grid deliver electric energy from one place to another. They are also facing their own evolving and developing challenges in the new contexts, respectively. For Internet, its primary arena has changed dramatically from its initial academic usage to the commercial world which brought a series of research challenges and issues. The power grid, on the other hand, has a strong urge to transform its infrastructure with more intelligence, using networking and computing technologies. Creating a smarter grid will improve energy efficiency, promote renewable energy generation and usage, and enable a global sustainable world. In this talk, I will focus on my research contributions covering two inter-correlated parts: (1) future Internet architecture and related research issues such as inter-domain routing scalability, mobility and multihoming, traffic engineering, and policy enforcement; (2) inter-disciplinary topics related to cyber-assisted energy efficiency in intelligent buildings and microgrids, and cyber-assisted sustainability.

For the first part, we proposed a holistic, open, and evolutionary new Internet architecture named MILSA with new design principles matching the new contexts. I will talk about the major framework of MILSA and some evaluation results of different deployment strategies. For the second part, by researching in a combined perspective of networking, energy, and smart grid, we investigated methods to promote global-scale energy efficiency by improved intelligence in buildings and consumer-side microgrids. I will talk about the energy consumption data analysis we have done and our findings. We envision a new "energy proportional buildings" prospect inspired by the "energy proportional computers" for energy efficiency. A smart-location based automated energy control solution in building environment was proposed. We built a prototype system and carried out a series of experiments to prove the effectiveness of the idea. The idea potentially can generate huge economic and social impacts to the whole society. We also envision that larger-scale microgrids formed by such optimized distributed buildings can be networked and dynamically allocate and schedule their energy generation and consumption capacities to achieve the goals of energy independence and hence sustainability in multiple scales. Further study includes the networking mechanisms and dynamical scheduling algorithms to accomplish the research goals.