Nowadays, it is widely recognised that the sole introduction of low consumption silicon elements will not be sufficient to effectively curb tomorrow's network energy requirements. Based on this assumption, the ECONET project will investigate, develop and test new capabilities for the Future Internet devices enabling the efficient management of power consumption so to strongly reduce the current energy waste.The ECONET project will be devoted at re-thinking and re-designing network equipment towards more energy-sustainable and eco-friendly technologies and perspectives. The overall idea is to introduce novel green network-specific paradigms and concepts enabling the reduction of energy requirements of wired network equipment by 50% in the short/mid-term (and by 80% in the long run) with respect to the business-as-usual scenario.To this end, the main challenge is to design, develop and test novel technologies, integrated control criteria and mechanisms for network equipment allowing energy saving by dynamically adapting the device capacities and consumptions to current traffic loads and user requirements.The ECONET project will focus its research and development efforts in three main research axes:- In the first axis, novel network-specific HW/FW technologies will be developed to optimise the power management features.- The second axis will be devoted to develop local and distributed frameworks for dynamic optimization of the trade-off between energy consumption and network performance.- The last axis will focus on the design of a Green Abstraction Layer for interfacing the novel low-level green capabilities with OAM frameworks in a common and standard way.The ECONET project will deliver novel energy-aware device prototypes on which large-scale demonstration tests will be conducted. With a significant dissemination effort, the project will aim at maximising its impact on industrial and network operator communities as well as on standardization bodies.