Re: Network Energy Management

[Hesham ElBakoury <[e-mail]>]

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]> 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]] On Behalf Of Hesham ElBakoury
> Sent: Friday, August 5, 2022 7:12 AM
> To: IETF <[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
>
>