Drouant et al. clarify from the beginning of the paper that their goal is to check if philosophical concepts from ecology make sense when considering a technical system, which takes into account all requirements and constraints of the global system. The proposal of ten commandments for mature ecosystems in the book Biomimicry by Benyus [1] guides the design of technical systems. The design of the system is evaluated according to two points of view--project-system and the system of interest--and metrics are proposed for both.
According to the authors, “The objective of this paper is to propose a framework for designing environment-friendly network architectures, taking into account the lessons adopted by mature ecosystems.” The framework is based upon the definition of metrics to evaluate both the project-system and system of interest points of view.
The authors describe the ten commandments for mature ecosystems. Later, they specify how to implement the commandments in the design of the technical system by defining a set of indicators, including a checklist example and measures of effectiveness (MoE).
The checklist is proposed as a way to involve ecological decisions during system planning and design. MoE, defined according to the commandments, are required to compare different technical solutions. The addition of the whole set of elements consuming energy is the basis for evaluating the ten commandments.
The paper presents a simple example to illustrate the proposal. I like the paper because it relates two different worlds, and proposes design criteria based on a set of facts/principles. However, I consider the checklist to be a very elemental proposal. In a real system, there are many possible situations, even when one selects a cable from a different manufacturer. I think there are many options to analyze. The paper is a good starting point for elaborating more precise metrics, and for proposing some ways to measure such metrics automatically. Network simulators, such as ns-2, could integrate such a framework in order to evaluate energy consumption while designing a network.