Network Working Group C. Pignataro, Ed. Internet-Draft NC State University Intended status: Best Current Practice A. Rezaki Expires: 10 December 2024 Nokia J. Arkko Ericsson A. Clemm Futurewei H. ElBakoury Independent Consultant 8 June 2024 Sustainability Considerations for Networking Protocols and Applications draft-pignataro-enviro-sustainability-consid-00 Abstract Embedding sustainability considerations at the design of new protocols and extensions is more effective than attempting to do so after-the-fact. Consequently, this document also gives network, protocol, and application designers and implementors sustainability- related advice and guideance. This document recommends to authors and reviewers the inclusion of a Sustainability Considerations section in IETF Internet-Drafts and RFCs. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on 10 December 2024. Pignataro, et al. Expires 10 December 2024 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Sustainability Considerations June 2024 Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2024 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/ license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.1. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Implications to the IETF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. Sustainability Guidelines for Protocol and Network Designers and Implementers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 4. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4.1. Call to Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1. Introduction The ultimate objective of this document is to detail guidance regarding aspects of sustainability and environmental impact that authors and reviewers of Internet protocol and architecture documents should consider in a "Sustainability Considerations" section. 1.1. Terminology This document leverages the terminology and concepts defined in [I-D.pignataro-enviro-sustainability-terminology], and readers are expected to be familiar with those. Specifically, Section 3.1.1 of [I-D.pignataro-enviro-sustainability-terminology] describes contepts of particular relevance to this draft. Pignataro, et al. Expires 10 December 2024 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Sustainability Considerations June 2024 2. Implications to the IETF This section describes the implications of sustainability to the IETF. Specifically, the high-level relevant areas on which the IETF can act upon, and a rough prioritization. These potentially include use cases, protocols, metrics, etc. A key area to understand the relevance and implication is regarding IETF Protocols. 3. Sustainability Guidelines for Protocol and Network Designers and Implementers This section renders the Sustainability Considerations into specific guidelines and advice for the design and development of networking technologies. These specific items are labeled so as to follow and reference as a check-list. a. General: The section title "Sustainability Considerations" should be used to detail the environmental-impact implications of protocols, architectures, and Internet technologies. a.1. For each of the items covered, explicitly state the "boundary of analysis" considered. For example, this can include a scope, time boundary, or lifecycle phases. a.2. Consider attributional versus consequential analysis methods, explaining environmental impact benefits. a.3. Clearly state the units used for each magnitude in every analysis (e.g., gCO2e/KWh.) b. Network Management: Several areas of network management have direct relationship with sustainability. b.1. Metrics: Instrument equipment, network elements, and networks with a set of relevant and meaningful metrics that provide visibility into sustainability and environmental-impact attributes (e.g., power and energy consumption.) This is the foundation for any mechanisms to improve and optimize sustainability. Pignataro, et al. Expires 10 December 2024 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Sustainability Considerations June 2024 b.2. Managed Elements: Facilitate, extend, and enrich the manageability of network elements and sub-elements which have environmental impact, such as Power Supplies. For example, provide visibility into sourced power, e.g. energy mix, and allow to account for the "dirtiness" of power being consumed to obtain a truer picture of sustainability than can be gained by visibility into power consumption alone. c. Energy Management: Minimizing energy consumption is a critical consideration in making networks more sustainable. Minimizing energy consumption typically comes also with important economic side benefits associated with reducing operational expenses and making network providers more competitive. To facilitate energy efficiency schemes, designers of networking devices and protocols should examine and consider the following considerations: c.1. Energy linearity. In many cases, the amount of power drawn by a device is not in linear proportion to the volume of traffic that is passed. Instead, energy consumption when idle generally accounts for a very significant percentage of the energy consumption when under full load. The implication of this is that the volume of traffic by itself is of relative consequence to energy consumption, as long as the volume does not get to the point where additional equipment needs to be added to the network to handle peak loads. c.2. Power saving modes. Similarly, many devices and resources support power saving modes that can be entered when idled. Similarly, during periods of exceedingly low traffic, some links may support downspeeding associated with energy savings. As a result, a big opportunity for energy savings involves schemes in which resources are temporarily put into power saving modes, including almost shut-down, at times when they are not needed. c.3. Chattiness of protocols. For a given protocol, what are the message exchange patterns? does the protocol rely on periodic updates or heartbeat messages? Could such message patterns result in preventing links or nodes from going to sleep (absent other communications), and in such a case, would an alternative pattern be feasible? Pignataro, et al. Expires 10 December 2024 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Sustainability Considerations June 2024 c.4. Exploiting burstiness versus smoothening of traffic. Is it feasible to design the protocol in such a way that traffic is sent with a smoother traffic pattern with lower traffic volumes that are sent continuously, as opposed to a way that traffic is bulked up and then sent in one fell swoop? c.5. Rapid discovery and convergence. Does the protocol involve the exchange of state and information about other systems? In that case, how can the protocol be designed in such that any such information can be discovered quickly and protocol synchronization reconverged efficiently? Does the protocol design support stateful schemes that might accelerate this? In cases where there is a possibility of nodes going to sleep, the associated overhead of going offline and coming back online should be minimized. By shortening the time interval needed to go offline and come back online, it might be possible to have enter sleep mode in situations where it would otherwise not be feasible. c.6. Encoding schemes. How much computational effort goes into encoding and decoding? Assess the tradeoff between encoding efficiency and computational effort, which directs into carbon for cycles to perform coding operations. d. Carbon Awareness: d.1. Consider Carbon Intensity (CI) / Emission Factor (EF) as an attribute. For example, CI is used to optimize for lower- carbon sources of electrical energy (e.g., using renewables.) Prioritizing electricity use when carbon intensity is low is a target, and, for that, this attribute needs to be accessed or advertised. d.2. Consider embodied emissions (i.e., embedded carbon) with any new product. For example, a new generation of networking device might significantly improve energy efficiency, and a replacement migration would include the embedded emissions (of producing and transporting the new product as well as disposing of the old one), and hence there's a break-even point (BEP). e. Beyond Carbon: Characterize and note full-spectrum environmental impacts, beyond GHG emissions, and into water usage, raw materials usage, circularity in supply chain, repurpose, reuse, and recycle, etc. e.1. WIP Pignataro, et al. Expires 10 December 2024 [Page 5] Internet-Draft Sustainability Considerations June 2024 e.2. WIP 4. Conclusion The pre-eminent message in this document is to elevate the need and sense of urgency of including sustainability considerations in our protocol and system design, and to provide editors with a sustainability lexicon, definitions, and priorities to carry out that task. As an added benefit, by including sustainability considerations, it will be possible to optimize for not only performance parameters but also sustainability ones, through respective trade-offs in our protocols and systems. We also envision that on top of minimizing the environmental impact of our technologies and helping consumers identify and reduce the environmental impact of their use, we can also make a positive impact on other systems. E.g., use our technologies to choose greener and more efficient sources of power, control HVAC systems efficiently, etc. 4.1. Call to Action The intention of this document is multifaceted: establish definitions and a lexicon for sustainability, characterize environmental implications of internetworking technologies, and provide specific guidelines for designers and implementors. Making these objectives actionable involves: 1. Familiarize yourself with the environmental sustainabilithy terms, 2. understand the environmental sustainability implications to protocol and architecture, and 3. consider, qualify, quantify, and explain the specific guidelines in Section 3 as you develop protocols, extensions, and architectures. 5. Security Considerations Sustainable practices offer many environmental, economic, and social benefits, and security is a route to sustainability rather than a hurdle to clear. Pignataro, et al. Expires 10 December 2024 [Page 6] Internet-Draft Sustainability Considerations June 2024 6. Acknowledgements This document is created greatly leveraging ideas and text from [I-D.cparsk-eimpact-sustainability-considerations], and consequently acknowledges all the many contributions that improved it. 7. Informative References [I-D.cparsk-eimpact-sustainability-considerations] Pignataro, C., Rezaki, A., Krishnan, S., ElBakoury, H., and A. Clemm, "Sustainability Considerations for Internetworking", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft- cparsk-eimpact-sustainability-considerations-07, 24 January 2024, . [I-D.pignataro-enviro-sustainability-terminology] Pignataro, C., Rezaki, A., and H. ElBakoury, "Environmental Sustainability Terminology and Concepts", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-pignataro-enviro- sustainability-terminology-00, 8 June 2024, . Authors' Addresses Carlos Pignataro (editor) North Carolina State University United States of America Email: cpignata@gmail.com, cmpignat@ncsu.edu Ali Rezaki Nokia Germany Email: ali.rezaki@nokia.com Jari Arkko Ericsson Email: jari.arkko@ericsson.com Alexander Clemm Futurewei 2220 Central Expressway Santa Clara, CA 95050 United States of America Pignataro, et al. Expires 10 December 2024 [Page 7] Internet-Draft Sustainability Considerations June 2024 Email: ludwig@clemm.org Hesham ElBakoury Independent Consultant United States of America Email: helbakoury@gmail.com Pignataro, et al. Expires 10 December 2024 [Page 8]