Challenges and Opportunities in Green Networking

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Climate change and the need to curb greenhouse emissions have been recognized by the United Nations and by most governments as one of the big challenges of our time. As a result, improving energy efficiency and reducing power consumption are becoming of increasing importance for society and for many industries. The networking industry is no exception.¶

Arguably, networks can already be considered "green" technology in that networks enable many applications that allow users and whole industries to save energy and become more sustainable in a significant way. For example, it allows (at least to an extent) to replace travel with teleconferencing; it enables many employees to work from home and "telecommute," thus reducing the need for actual commute; IoT applications that facilitate automated monitoring and control from remote sites help make agriculture more sustainable by minimizing the application of resources such as water and fertilizer; networked smart buildings allow for greater energy optimization and sparser use of lighting and HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) than their non-networked not-so-smart counterparts.¶

That said, networks themselves consume significant amounts of energy. Therefore, the networking industry has an important role to play in meeting sustainability goals not just by enabling others to reduce their reliance on energy, but by also reducing its own. Future networking advances will increasingly need to focus on becoming more energy-efficient and reducing carbon footprint, both for economic reasons and for reasons of corporate responsibility. This shift has already begun and sustainability is already becoming an important concern for network providers. In some cases such as in the context of networked data centers, the ability to procure enough energy becomes a bottleneck prohibiting further growth and greater sustainability thus becomes a business necessity.¶

For example, in its annual report, Telefonica reports that in 2020, its network's energy consumption per PB of data amounted to 78MWh [telefonica2020]. This rate has has been dramatically decreasing (a five-fold factor over five years) although gains in efficiency are being offset by simultaneous growth in data volume. In the same report, it is stated as an important corporate goal to continue on that trajectory and reduce overall carbon emissions by 70% over the next 5 years.¶

From a technical perspective, multiple vectors along which networks can be made "greener" should be considered:¶

• At the equipment level. Perhaps the most promising vector for improving networking sustainability concerns the network equipment itself. At the most fundamental level, networks (even softwarized ones) involve appliances, i.e. equipment that relies on electrical power to perform its function. However, beyond making those appliances merely energy-efficient, there are other important ways in which equipment can help networks become greener. This includes aspects such as support for port power saving modes allowing to reduce power consumption for resources that are not fully utilized, but also instrumentation that allows to precisely monitor power usage at different levels of granularity, enabling (for example) controllers applications that aim to optimize energy usage across the network. (As a side note, the term "device", as used in the context of this draft, is used to refer to networking equipment. We are not taking into consideration end-user devices and endpoints such as mobile phones or computing equipment.)¶
• At the protocol level. Energy-efficiency and greenness are aspects that are rarely considered when designing network protocols. This suggests that there may be plenty of untapped potential. Some aspects involve designing protocols in ways that reduce the need for redundant or wasteful transmission of data to allow not only for better network utilization, but greater goodput per unit of energy being consumed. Techniques include approaches that reduce the "header tax" incurred by payloads as well as methods resulting in the reduction of wasteful retransmissions. Likewise, aspects such as restructuring addresses in ways that allow to minimize the size of lookup tables and associated memory sizes and their energy use can play a role as well. Another role of protocols concerns the enabling of functionality to improve energy efficiency at the network level, such as discovery protocols that allow for quick adaptation to network components being taken dynamically into and out of service depending on network conditions.¶
• At the network level. Perhaps the greatest opportunities to realize power savings exist at the level of the network as whole. For example, optimizing energy efficiency may involve directing traffic in such a way that it allows for isolation of equipment that may at the moment not be needed so that it could be powered down or brought into power-saving mode. By the same token, traffic should be directed in a way that requires bringing additional equipment online or out of power-saving mode in cases where alternative traffic paths are available for which the incremental energy cost would amount to zero. Likewise, some networking devices may be more power-intensive than others whose use might be avoided unless required to meet peak capacity demands. Generally, incremental power consumption can be viewed as a cost metric that networks should strive to minimize and consider as part of routing and of network path optimization.¶
• At the architecture level. The current network architecture supports a wide range of applications, but does not take into account energy efficiency as one of its design parameters. One can argue that the most energy efficient shift of the last two decades has been the deployment of Content Delivery Network overlays: while these were set up to reduce latency and minimize bandwidth consumption, from a network perspective, retrieving the content from a local cache is also much greener. What other architectural shifts can produce energy consumption reduction?¶

We believe that network standardization organizations in general, and IETF in particular, can make important contributions to each of these vectors. In this document, we will there explore each of those vectors in further detail and for each point out specific challenges for IETF.¶

It should be noted that this document borrows heavily from material from a prior paper, [GreenNet22]. This material has been both expanded (for example, in terms of some of the opportunities) and pruned (for example, in terms of background on prior scholarly work). In addition, unlike the prior paper, this document focuses on and attempts to articulate specific challenges as related to work that could be championed by the IETF.¶

4. Challenges and Opportunities - Equipment Level

Perhaps the most obvious opportunities to make networking technology more energy efficient exist at the equipment level. After all, networking involves physical equipment to receive and transmit data. Making such equipment more power efficient, have it dissipate less heat to consume less energy and reduce the need for cooling, making it eco-friendly to deploy, sourcing sustainable materials and facilitating recycling of equipment at the end of its life-cycle all contribute to making networks greener. More specific and unique to networking are schemes to reduce energy usage of transmission technology from wireless (antennas) to optical (lasers).¶

Beyond such "first-order" opportunities, network equipment just as importantly plays an important role to enable and support green networking at other levels. Of prime importance is the equipment's ability to provide visibility to management and control plane into its current energy usage. Such visibility enables control loops for energy optimization schemes, allowing applications to obtain feedback regarding the energy implications of their actions, from setting up paths across the network that require the least incremental amount of energy to quantifying metrics related to energy cost used to optimize forwarding decisions.¶

One prerequisite to such schemes is to have proper instrumentation in place that allows to monitor current power consumption at the level of networking devices as a whole, line cards, and individual ports. Such instrumentation should also allow to assess the energy efficiency and carbon footprint of the device as a whole. In addition, it would be desirable to relate this power consumption to data rates as well as to current traffic, for example, to indicate current energy consumption relative to interface speeds, as well as for incremental energy consumption that is expected for incremental traffic (to aid control schemes that aim to "shave" power off current services or to minimize the incremental use of power for additional traffic). This is an area where the current state of the art is sorely lacking and standardization lags behind; for example, as of today, no corresponding standardized YANG data models [RFC7950] for network energy consumption that can be used in conjunction with management and control protocols have been defined.¶

Instrumentation should also take into account the possibility of virtualization, introducing layers of indirection to assess the actual energy usage. For example, virtualized networking functions could be hosted on containers or virtual machines which are hosted on a CPU in a data center instead of a regular network appliance such as a router or a switch, leading to very different power consumption characteristics. For example, a data center CPU could be more power efficient and consume power more proportionally to actual CPU load. Instrumentation needs to reflect these facts and facilitate attributing power consumption in a correct manner.¶

Beyond monitoring and providing visibility into power consumption, control knobs are needed to configure energy saving policies. For instance, power saving modes are common in endpoints (such as mobile phones or notebook computers) but sorely lacking in networking equipment.¶

5. Challenges and Opportunities - Protocol Level

There are several opportunities for energy savings at the protocol level. We characterize them along three main categories: protocols designed to reduce the volume of data to be transmitted; protocols designed to optimize data transmission rates under energy considerations; and protocols that enable energy optimization schemes at the network level. A fourth category, "other", is used to capture any other aspects not easily categorized into the other three.¶

6. Challenges and Opportunities - Network Level

Networks have been optimized for many years under many criteria, for example to optimize (maximize) network utilization and to optimize (minimize) cost. Hence, it is straighforward to add optimization for "greenness" (including energy efficiency, power consumption, carbon footprint) as important criteria.¶

This includes assessing the carbon footprints of paths and optimizing those paths so that overall footprint is minimized, then applying techniques such as path-aware networking or segment routing [RFC8402] to steer traffic along those paths. It also includes aspects such as considering the incremental energy usage in routing decisions. Optimizing cost has a long tradition in networking; many of the existing mechanisms can be leveraged for greener networking simply by introducing energy footprint as a cost factor. Low-hanging fruit include the inclusion of energy-related parameters as a cost parameter in control planes, whether distributed (e.g. IGP) or conceptually centralized via SDN controllers.¶

Other opportunities concern adding energy-awareness to dynamic path selection schemes, requiring corresponding instrumentation as mentioned earlier. Again, considerable energy savings can potentially be realized by taking resources offline (e.g. putting them into power-saving or hibernation mode) when they are not currently needed under current network demand and load conditions. Therefore, weaning such resources from traffic becomes an important consideration for energy-efficient traffic steering. This contrasts and indeed conflicts with existing schemes that typically aim to create redundancy and load-balance traffic across a network to achieve even resource utilization. This usually occurs for important reasons, such as making networks more resilient, optimizing service levels, and increasing fairness. One of the big challenges hence concerns how resource weaning schemes to realize energy savings can be accommodated while preventing the cannibalization of other important goals, counteracting other established mechanisms, and avoiding destabilization of the network.¶

As an important prerequisite to capture many of those opportunities, good abstractions (and corresponding instrumentation) that allow to easily assess energy cost and carbon footprint will be required. These abstractions need to account for not only for the energy cost associated with packet forwarding across a given path, but related cost for processing, for memory, for maintaining of state, to result in a holistic picture. Optimization of carbon footprint involves in many cases trade-offs that involve not only packet forwarding but also aspects such as keeping state, caching data, or running computations at the edge instead of elsewhere. (Note: there may be a differential in running a computation at an edge server vs. at an hyperscale DC. The latter is often better optimized than the latter.) Likewise, other aspects of carbon footprint beyond mere energy-intensity should be considered. For instance, some network segments may be powered by more sustainable energy sources than others, and some network equipment may be more environmentally-friendly to build, deploy and recycle, all of which can be reflected in abstractions to consider.¶

A related set of challenges concerns the fact that such schemes result in much greater dynamicity and continuous change in the network as resources may be getting steered away from (when possible) and then leveraged again (when necessary) in rapid succession. This imposes significant stress on convergence schemes that results in challenges to the scalability of solutions and their ability to perform in a fast-enough manner. Network-wide convergence imposes high cost and incurs significant delay and is hence not susceptible to such schemes. The impact will in all likelihood needs to be mechanisms that do not require convergence beyond the vicinity of the affected network device. Especially in cases where central network controllers are involved that are responsible for aspects such as configuration of paths and the positioning of network functions and that aim for global optimization, the impact of churn needs to be minimized. This means that, for example, extensive recalculation e.g. of routes and paths based on the current energy state of the network needs to be avoided.¶

An opportunity may lie in making a distinction between "energy modes" of different domains. For instance, in a highly trafficked core, the energy challenge is to transmit the traffic efficiently. The amount of traffic is relatively fluid (due to multiplexing of multiple sessions) and the traffic is predictable. In this case, there is no need to optimize on a per session basis nor even at a short time scale. In the access networks connecting to that core, though, there are opportunites for this fast convergence: traffic is much more bursty, less predictable and the network should be able to be more reactive. Other domains such as DCs may have also more variable workloads and different traffic patterns.¶

7. Challenges and Opportunities - Architecture Level

Another possibility to improve network energy efficiency is to organize networks in a way that they can best serve important applications so as to minimize energy consumption. Examples include retrieval of content or remote computation. This allows to minimize the amount of communication that needs to take place in the first place, although energy savings within the network may at least in part be offset by additional energy consumption elsewhere. The following are some examples that suggest that it may be worthwhile reconsidering the ways in which networks are architected to minimize their carbon footprint.¶

For example, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have reduced the energy expenditure of the Internet by downloading content near the users. The content is sent only a few times over the WAN, and then is served locally. This shifts the energy consumption from networking to storage. Further methods can reduce the energy usage even more [bianco2016energy][mathew2011energy][islam2012evaluating]. Whether overall energy savings are net positive depends on the actual deployment, but from the network operator's perspective, at least it shifts the energy bill away from the network to the CDN operator.¶

While CDNs operate as an overlay, another architecture has been proposed to provide the CDN features directly in the network, namely Information Centric Networks [ahlgren2012survey], studied as well in the IRTF ICNRG. This however shifts the energy consumption back to the network operator and requires some power-hungy hardware, such as chips for larger name look-ups and memory for the in-network cache. As a result, it is unclear if there is an actual energy gain from the dissemination and retrieval of content within in-network caches.¶

Fog computing and placing intelligence at the edge are other architectural directions for reducing the amount of energy that is spent on packet forwarding and in the network. There again, the trade-off is between performing computation in a an energy-optimized data center at very large scale, but requiring transmission of significant volumes of data across many nodes and long distances, versus performing computational tasks at the edge where the energy may not be used as efficiently (less multiplexing of resources, and smaller sites are inherently less efficient due to their smaller scale) but the amount of long-distance network traffic is significantly reduced. Softwarization, containers, microservices are direct enablers for such architectures, and the deployment of programmable network infrastructure (as for instance Infrastructure Processing Units - IPUs or smartNICs that offload some computations from the CPU onto the NIC) will help its realization. However, the power consumption characteristics of CPUs are different from those of NPUs, another aspect to be considered in conjunction with virtualization.¶

Other possibilities concern taking economic aspects into consideration impact, such as providing incentives to users of networking services in order to minimize energy consumption and emission impact. An example for this is given in [wolf2014choicenet], which could be expanded to include energy incentives.¶

Other approaches consider performing a late binding of data and functions to be performed on the data [krol2017NFaaS]. The COIN Research Group in IRTF focuses on similar issues. Jointly optimizing for the total energy cost, taking into account networking and computing (and the different energy cost of computing in an hyperscale DC vs an edge node) is still an area of open research.¶

In summary, rethinking of the overall network (and networked application) architecture can be an opportunity to significantly reduce the energy cost at the network layer, for example by performing tasks that involve massive communications closer to the user. To what extend these shifts result in a net reduction of carbon footprint is an important question that requires further analysis on a case-by-case basis.¶

Authors' Addresses