RE: Network Energy Management

[Tianran Zhou <[e-mail]>]

Yes, that’s exactly my confusion.

Tianran

From: Joel Halpern [mailto:[e-mail]]
Sent: Friday, August 5, 2022 10:13 AM
To: Tianran Zhou <[e-mail]>; Hesham ElBakoury <[e-mail]>
Cc: IETF <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Network Energy Management


I am finding this conversation somewhta strange.

Having the ability to monitor energy consumption and report it is understandable.  And I can see how the reporting of that could fall into a YANG module or similar construct done in the IETF.

But power distribution, power storage, power rearrangement?  That is for power engineers, not the IETF.  We don't tell people how to power their routers.  We don't tell them whether to put batteries in the router, in their UPS, or somewhere else entirely.  Not our expertise.

We have in the past discussed turning things off when not in use.  As noted earlier in the thread, from where we sit, rather tricky.   Someone developing an AI / ML system to drive heuristics for it may or may not be useful.  But again doesn't look like IETF business.  Our job is to provide the data such systems would need.  Which we already do.

Yours,

Joel
On 8/4/2022 9:53 PM, Tianran Zhou wrote:
Hi Hesham,
To be specific, what’s your thoughts on the following two use cases.

3- Use traffic analysis and modeling techniques perhaps with AI/ML algorithms to predict which elements to power down/up and when, in such a way to avoid service disruption.
4- Use renewable energy, store it in the router and return back to the energy source the energy that is not used so that someone else can use it.

Thanks,
Tianran

From: Hesham ElBakoury [mailto:[e-mail]]
Sent: Friday, August 5, 2022 9:08 AM
To: Tianran Zhou <[e-mail]><mailto:[e-mail]>
Cc: IETF <[e-mail]><mailto:[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Network Energy Management

There are publicatipns about changes to IP, TCP, Routing Protocols, Traffic Engineering, ... etc but I am not sure if these changes are implemented and deployed in service provider networks.

Thanks

Hesham

On Thu, Aug 4, 2022, 5:49 PM Tianran Zhou <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
While I think this is an very interesting topic that I would like to follow, I am confused most of the proposal here may not related to network protocol.
I.e, I am not sure what IETF can help on this.

Best,
Tianran

-----Original Message-----
From: ietf [mailto:[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>] On Behalf Of Hesham ElBakoury
Sent: Friday, August 5, 2022 7:12 AM
To: IETF <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>
Subject: Network Energy Management

There has been some discussions in IETF 114 about how to reduce the network energy consumption and carbon footprint. Most of the energy-aware routing and traffic engineering publications that I have seen rely on powering down network elements such as interfaces, line cards and routers to save power. The problems with this approach are: 1) to power up these elements when they are needed may take long time which may cause undesirable service disruption, and 2) network operators may not trust routing and traffic engineering software to power down and up these elements without operator intervention.

To address these problems we may do one of the following:

1- Do not power down any network element, and try some other way to reduce energy such as adjusting the cooling level based on network load.

2- Do not power down any network element, but put the element in low power idle state to consume least amount of power while it is not used to forward traffic.  In this state it is quicker to bring the element into fully operational state. This solution may require hardware support.

3- Use traffic analysis and modeling techniques perhaps with AI/ML algorithms to predict which elements to power down/up and when, in such a way to avoid service disruption.

4- Use renewable energy, store it in the router and return back to the energy source the energy that is not used so that someone else can use it.

5- If you have other approaches, please let us know.

In all these approaches we need to instrument the network to monitor its traffic loading and energy consumption.

Comments ?

Hesham