Re: [recipe] And another new draft revision: Green Networking Metrics

["Schooler, Eve M" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Alex and co-authors, 
Thanks for a very interesting read (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-cx-green-metrics/)!
Here is some informal feedback on the latest version of the draft document.
Best regards, 
Eve

Eve M. Schooler, PhD
Principal Engineer & Director
Intel | CSO & NEX | Emerging IoT Networks
2200 Mission College Blvd., Santa Clara, CA, USA  95054
+1 650.868.7369
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Abstract:
In the abstract there is reference to "power consumption, energy efficiency and carbon footprint", for both network equipment and services provided over it - would be great to describe the relationship between these three attributes somewhere. In the Intro, language is also used re "environmental sustainability of networks", which may go beyond energy-related metrics.

Section 1. Intro
- Why cite the Telefonica Consolidated annual report vs Sustainability report?

Section 2. Definitions and Acronyms
- Include kWh

Section 3. Energy Metrics
- For each bullet, give examples of existing metrics.
- 3rd bullet references energy intensity. Is this a term commonly used? Does it need specific definition
- Either way, contrast this with carbon intensity.

3.1.1 Energy consumption Metrics
- Any thoughts/precedent on how to separate the carbon footprint of a device from the networking aspects of the device?
- Are we only gaging router power consumption, or other network HW elements? What about SW? Different parts of the stack?
- Love the reference to ATIS, which makes me wonder about certification of the numbers associated with the various device elements and the devices overall?
- Re "The second set of metrics reflects the actual power being drawn during operation." What about embodied carbon, which for smaller devices such as phones is a dominating factor?
- Odd to see the terms "kilooctet" and "gigaoctet"; why not simply kB or gB? Yes to pico Joules.

3.1.2 Other Metrics
- A common sustainability rating of the power source is carbon intensity. A good publication to read, where carbon intensity is considered, but so is a waste metric to capture environmental impact beyond energy and carbon: 
    + Hossain, Md. Mohaimenul, Georges, Jean-Phillippe, Rondeau, Eric, Divoux, Thierry. Energy, carbon and renewable energy: Candidate metrics for green-aware routing? Sensors, 19(13), Feb 2019.
- "It may be possible to obtain such a rating from the energy operation...."
    + I really like that the document includes such a statement. It would be helpful for each of the metrics discussions to include: from whom the measurements for the metric might originate
- If deployment of the device is outside a Data Center (DC) and actually is in the wild, e.g., an RSU (road side unit), should the device be charged an energy tax for releasing its heat into the atmosphere?

3.1.3 Virtualization Considerations
- 2nd paragraph seems to imply that DCs because they are more energy efficient should be the target environment of choice. However, in Edge IoT contexts, there may be too much data to be able to migrate a container to a back-end cloud, thus the cloud must stay local. In other words, the choice to process a container locally may have other constraints (data volume, privacy, latency, that prohibit it from being placed in a more PUE-optimal setting).
- Orchestration SW, Developers, run-time systems, are all going to want to have insight into how to untangle virtualization and CFP. Perhaps the demand is to insist that HW manufacturers support SW APIs that can extract and export this data upon request. IETF may or may not be the place to define those APIs, but we should help critique them and ensure they support the metadata we need to properly calculate and to properly attribute impact of the network elements (HW/FW/SW).

3.2 Energy Metrics related to Flows
- "In its basic incarnation, those metrics reflect the energy consumption at a given device."
    + There are many hidden devices that are like supporting cast members for each Layer 3 device, making this seem nearly impossible, unless the owners/operators are involved in assessing the supporting infrastructure that enables that device. This is similar to saying services reside in DCs and they consume x% of the overall energy, therefore there is a fair share of a carbon tax that all services must contribute towards cooling.
- "Amortized energy consumed over the duration of the flow"
    + Expecting this to help us compute the aforementioned carbon tax that goes unaccounted when we only consider the router itself. Basically, compute a percentage of the total unaccounted for energy usage, to tax the app or flow.
- "A second set of energy metrics related to flow might aggregate the flow's energy consumption over the entire flow path". 
    + This should be do-able at least if thought of as an approximation or a bound/threshold of some sort
    + Also, it begs the question if we can/should reserve resources along that path to use lowest carbon-intensity

3.3 Energy Metrics related to Paths
- Need to articulate somewhere how energy usage and carbon footprint relate to each other. It would then be more clear that carbon-intensity is a useful attribute for consideration in these steering decisions, as the carbon-intensity of electricity in Poland is 80x the carbon intensity of electricity in Sweden.

4.1 User perspective
- A discussion of incentivization could be fruitful here (or at least a discussion of stick vs carrot, tax vs tax break). For instance, have reduce rates for users who have time-elastic data transmissions. 

4.2 Holistic perspective
- See reference cited above for an example of other metrics outside energy/carbon

4.3 Sustainable equipment production - really enjoyed reading this section
- With which other organizations should IETF partner to affect change in the lifecycle of networking devices and systems?
- What should the IETF as a community demand from HW/FW/SW manufacturers?
    + For real-time instrumentation
    + For data sheets on expected energy usages
    + APIs to access/modify/disseminate carbon-footprint-related data
    + Published embodied carbon in the manufacturing of networking equipment - i.e., product carbon footprints
    + Ramp up of Circularity programs - which might look categorically different in developed vs developing nations

-----Original Message-----
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2022 20:53:30 -0700
From: Alexander Clemm <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: [recipe] And another new draft revision: Green Networking Metrics
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

As subject line:  FYI, we have just posted a new revision of draft-cx-green-metrics, "Green Networking Metrics", here: 
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-cx-green-metrics/

The updates are mostly of a relatively minor nature to provide further editorial quality.

--- Alex (on behalf of coauthors)



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