IETF
IAB Program
Environmental Impacts of Internet Technology (eimpact)
Group description：
The E-Impact Program is a venue for discussing environmental impacts and sustainability of Internet technology. Within this scope, the program looks at trends, issues, improvement opportunities, ideas, best practices, and subsequent direction of work related to Internet technology, architecture, and operations, including visibility and efficiency on energy and other environmentally-impacting attributes. In particular, the group focuses on Internet architecture’s role in these topics.
The program targets topics not yet progressed into concrete standards or research efforts in the IETF or IRTF while also being a coordination point for work across multiple WGs/RGs, and a venue to highlight ongoing work in the IETF/IRTF as well as external SDOs. The program will use the existing E-Impact mailing list [2] as the venue for discussions.
The program’s progress and the quality of discussion may point to the need to organize additional workshop(s) to continue the 2022 IAB workshop on the Environmental Impact of Internet Applications and Systems [1].
The program may work on documents that analyze areas where Internet technology faces challenges related to the program’s topics or provide architectural guidance. Potential examples of such documents include ones that describe sustainable network architectures, and those that document tradeoffs between environmental impacts and other characteristics such as performance and availability. Publishing any document as an RFC will be at the discretion of the IAB.
The program intends to have regular virtual meetings along with periodic hybrid meetings that are co-located with in-person IETF meetings. The program is open to all interested participants, and its meetings will be publicly announced.
References:
Drafts
1. Challenges and Opportunities in Green Networking
Publication URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-cx-green-ps
Introduction:
Reducing technology’s carbon footprint is one of the big challenges of our age. Networks are an enabler of applications that reduce this footprint, but also contribute to this footprint substantially themselves. The biggest opportunities to reduce the energy footprint may not be networking specific, for instance general power efficiency gains in hardware or hosting of equipment in more cooling-efficient buildings. Yet methods to make networking technology itself “greener” also need to be explored. This document outlines a corresponding set of opportunities, along with associated research challenges, for reducing this footprint and reducing network energy demand.
2. Green Networking Metrics
Publication URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-cx-green-metrics
Introduction:
This document explains the need for network instrumentation that allows to assess the power consumption, energy efficiency, and carbon footprint associated with a network, its equipment, and the services that are provided over it. It also suggests a set of related metrics that, when provided visibility into, can help to optimize a network’s energy efficiency and “greenness”.
3. Green Challenges in Computing-Aware Traffic Steering (CATS)
Publication URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-wang-cats-green-challenges
Introduction:
As mobile edge computing networks sink computing tasks from cloud data centers to the edge of the network, tasks need to be processed by computing resources close to the user side. Therefore, CATS was raised. Reducing carbon footprint is a major challenge of our time. Networks are the main enablers of carbon reductions. The introduction of computing dimension in CATS makes it insufficient to consider the energy saving of network dimension in the past, so the green for CATS based on network and computing combination is worth exploring. This document outlines a series of challenges and associated research to explore ways to reduce carbon footprint and reduce network energy based on CATS.
4. Path Energy Traffic Ratio API (PETRA)
Publication URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-petra-path-energy-api
Introduction:
Energy Traffic Ratio for a given path.
5. Power and Energy Efficiency
Publication URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-opsawg-poweff
Introduction:
This document motivates and specifies a data model to report power and energy efficiency of an asset. As highlighted during the IAB workshop on environmental impacts (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-iab-ws-environmental-impacts-report-00), visibility is a very important first step (paraphrasing Peter Drucker’s mantra of “You cannot improve what you don’t measure”). During the workshop the need for standardized metrics was established, to avoid proprietary, double counting and even contradictory metrics across vendors.
This Power and Energy Efficiency Telemetry Specification (POWEFF) is required to promote consistency across vendors and consumers, based on: 1. The definition of datasets and attributes defining a common data model utilized by the standard calculation to yield power and energy efficiency value for any asset or network element. 2. The standard calculations utilizing the specified datasets and attributes which will yield energy consumption and energy efficiency value for any asset or network element.
The model provides information and data requirements for calculating the Power and Energy Efficiency for specific assets. Assets can include hardware (physical or virtual), software, applications, or services.
6. Sustainability Insights
Publication URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-almprs-sustainability-insights
Introduction:
This document motivates the collection and aggregation of sustainability environmental related metrics. It describes the motivation and requirements to collect asset centric metrics including but not limited to power consumption and energy efficiency, circular economy properties, and more general metrics useful in environmental impact analysis. It provides foundations for building an industry-wide, open-source framework for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, enabling measurement and optimization of the overall impact on the environment of networking devices, software applications, services, and solutions across the lifecycle journey.
7. A YANG model for Power Management
Publication URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-li-ivy-power
Introduction:
Network sustainability is a key issue facing the industry. Networks consume significant amounts of power at a time when the cost of power is rising and sensitivity about sustainability is very high. As an industry, we need to find ways to optimize the power efficiency of our networks both at a micro and macro level. We have observed that traffic levels fluctuate and when traffic ebbs there is much more capacity than is needed. Powering off portions of network elements could save a significant amount of power, but to scale and be practical, this must be automated.
The natural mechanism for enabling automation would be a Yet Another Next Generation (YANG) interface, so this document proposes a YANG model for power management.