Dagstuhl Seminar on Greening Networking: Toward a Net Zero Internet
We (Alexander Clemm, Michael Welzl, Cedric Westphal, Noa Zilbermann, and I) organized a Dagstuhl seminar on Green Networking: Toward a Net Zero Internet.
Making Networks Greener
As climate change triggered by CO2 emissions dramatically impacts our environment and our everyday life, the Internet has proved a fertile ground for solutions, such as enabling teleworking or teleconferencing to reduce travel emissions. It is also a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, e.g. through its own significant power consumption. It is thus very important to make networks themselves "greener" and devise less carbon-intensive solutions while continuing to meet increasing network traffic demands and service requirements.
Computer scientists and engineers from world-leading universities and international companies, such as Ericsson, NEC, Netflix, Red Hat, and Telefonica came together in a Seminar on Green Networking (Toward a Net Zero Internet) at Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics, between September 29th and October 2nd, 2024. Organized by leading Internet researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), the University of Oxford, the University of Oslo and the University of California, Santa Cruz, they met to identify and prioritize the most impactful networking improvements to reduce carbon emission, define action items for a carbon-aware networking research agenda, and foster/facilitate research collaboration in order to reduce carbon emissions and to positively impact climate change.
Interactions between the Power Grid, Larger Systems, and the Network
In addition to pure networking issues, the seminar also analyzed the impact of larger systems that are built with Internet technologies, such as AI, multimedia streaming, and mobile communication networks. For example, the seminar discussed energy proportionality in networked systems, to allow systems to adapt their energy consumption to actual changes in utilization, so that savings can be achieved in idle times. Such a behavior would require better adaptiveness of applications and network protocols to cost information (such as carbon impact).
Moreover, networked systems can interact with the power grid in different ways, for example adapting energy consumption to current availability and cost of renewable energy, which can be helpful for joint planning of grid and network/networked-systems/cloud, achieving maximum efficiency/savings.
The seminar attendees are working with international research and standardization organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and ETSI, and it is expected that the seminar will make contributions to future research and standardization agendas in such organizations to bring the Internet to Net Zero emissions.
Organizers
- Alexander Clemm (Los Gatos, US)
- Dirk Kutscher (HKUST - Guangzhou, CN)
- Michael Welzl (University of Oslo, NO)
- Cedric Westphal (University of California, Santa Cruz, US)
- Noa Zilberman (University of Oxford, GB)