Re: [recipe] FYI: [admin-discuss] REMINDER: IETF carbon emission measurement workshops on 20 and 21 September

[Hesham ElBakoury <[e-mail]>]

I certainly agree with Mike about what he mentioned below: "*Sure, such 
things is a useful thing to discuss - but still, to me, it may only be a 
drop in the bucket compared to the potential that the IETF has when it 
comes to reducing energy for the Internet.**Whether the Internet truly 
makes up half, 1/4, even 1/10 of the aviation industry’s GHG emissions… 
just imagine the potential impact if we manage to even only reduce its 
energy by a small amount, but at a global scale!"*

Hesham*
*

On 9/24/2022 7:43 AM, Michael Welzl wrote:
> Hi !
>
> I’m answering to both Toerless and Cedric in one email here.
>
> Toerless:
>
>> On Sep 22, 2022, at 8:08 PM, Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> Michael:
>>
>> There where unfortunately only very few folks attending the IETF LLC 
>> admin meeting here
>> the current IETF plan to simply start to estimate the IETF meetings 
>> CO2/greenhouse-emissions
>> was presented. But it did look like a good first small step on a long 
>> road.
>>
>> For something like IETF meetings the next logical step IMHO is to 
>> discuss if or how there
>> is a benefit in some form of carbon offsetting. I think they've 
>> planned that as a next step.
>> I'd certainly like to learn more about that option because all i've 
>> read so far about it
>> is that most carbon offsetting seems to look fairly problematic to 
>> me. But maybe there are
>> some good options.
>
> Sure, such things is a useful thing to discuss - but still, to me, it 
> may only be a drop in the bucket compared to the potential that the 
> IETF has when it comes to reducing energy for the Internet.
> Whether the Internet truly makes up half, 1/4, even 1/10 of the 
> aviation industry’s GHG emissions… just imagine the potential impact 
> if we manage to even only reduce its energy by a small amount, but at 
> a global scale!
>
>
>> On the admin-discuss mailing list there was also an interesting 
>> pointer to a european
>> conference recommendations how to minimize carbon emissions for 
>> meetings. It looked
>> pretty good except that it didn't put different options into 
>> perspective. E.g.: it said
>> that reduccing video conference resolution from HD/4k to SD would 
>> reduce up to (forgot, e.g.:)
>> 70% energy consumption. Which i think may be true that lets say some 
>> 5% of the total
>> video stream network required energy might be changing based on 
>> resolution, even the whole
>> 100% of the network/end-user energy requirements. Which in itself 
>> would likely be just a small
>> portion of the energy of in-person meeting. In my 
>> draft-eckert-ietf-and-energy-overview,
>> i cited https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ 
>> S0140366414000620 which is a bit
>> old by now (aka: energy consumption of video likely having gone down 
>> already due to lower energy
>> per bit now), but still a good example of a comparative approach.
>
> I would be against trading quality of online meetings: as you say, 
> this is a tiny portion of the energy of in-person meeting … so it’s 
> probably more important to ensure the best possible online experience.
> I think we shouldn’t focus on trade-offs too much. There are ways to 
> reduce energy that do not embed a trade-off, and in some cases it can 
> even be a win-win (shorter FCT = more sleep time for devices).
>
> Cedric:
>
>> On Sep 22, 2022, at 11:53 PM, Cedric Westphal 
>> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> HI Michael & Toerless:
>> Michael: thank you very much for the data points.
>> Regarding your paper: I really like the idea that protocols can help 
>> saving energies. When we wrote our draft 
>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-cx-green-ps/ we were a bit 
>> disappointed that the protocol side of things didn’t have great 
>> opportunities for reducing energy consumption – aside of course of 
>> facilitating sleep modes as you suggest in your paper. If you have a 
>> chance to read it, we would welcome your comments. I’m currently 
>> updating it for London.
>
> I did read the draft, but didn’t have any comments. I did find it 
> interesting though!  I’ll be in London too, btw, and I’ll give a brief 
> presentation on the relationship between energy saving and congestion 
> control (just the simple result from my paper) to ICCRG there. I think 
> there are plenty of opportunities in protocols - they just need to be 
> worked out, evaluated, …   I mean, you point out some interesting 
> opportunities in your own draft.
>
>
>> Your paper seem to argue that short/high bandwidth transmissions are 
>> better than longer/slower ones – we wrote something like this in our 
>> paperhttps://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&citation_for_view=5WcgOxMAAAAJ:rJyh6hJnyfgC 
>> <https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&citation_for_view=5WcgOxMAAAAJ:rJyh6hJnyfgC>(upon 
>> which the draft is based on) and we got some pushback to the extent 
>> that: short/fast = burstiness = high buffers = packet loss = 
>> re-transmissions.
>
> Thanks, i’ll read this.
> Regarding bursts, I think we shouldn’t think about “bursts” and even 
> use a different word. Bulk? “Send data in bulk” as opposed to "sending 
> a burst”?
>
> This is an important distinction because data in bulk can (and 
> probably should) still be paced - we really shouldn’t be sending 
> bursts if we can avoid them. What I mean is something like sending 100 
> paced packets in 1 RTT instead of 10 packets per RTT over 10 RTTs.  In 
> fact, the Internet does the latter kind of transmission often enough. 
> Given typical flow lengths and growing capacities, the primary role of 
> congestion control in today’s Internet seems to be to waste our time 
> with round-trips (before transmissions are over). Some hints about 
> this: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9817041 (or: 
> http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06642 ) … and references therein, e.g. 
> https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3472305.3472321
>
>
>> I checked the spreadsheet on the other paper – they haven’t been updated.
>
> I did the same!  Disappointing, isn’t it.
>
>
>> It’s a strange paper, that makes a lot of assumption regarding energy 
>> consumption, but you have to start somewhere. I’m surprised you’re 
>> saying there hasn’t been follow up to that, it’s such an important topic.
>
> I don’t think I said that? There are plenty of studies out there, but 
> … it’s a jungle.
>
>
>> I definitely will add some paragraph or section on “emergy” in the 
>> next version of the draft.
>> This paper evaluates the emissions from virtual conferences – to keep 
>> in mind when comparing with IETF emissions from combined 
>> hybrid/in-person 
>> conference:https://forum.legacy-events.com/uploads/short-url/zmI7aFu6X6ojBESqz9IWKke4GW4.pdf
>> This paper assesses the value of in-person vs virtual to be 66 times 
>> higher from the travel alone (but that’s 99% of the in-person energy 
>> cost!)
>
> Thanks!
>
>> Toerless: was that paper cited at the workshop???
>> Best,
>> C.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Michael
>
>
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