Internet DRAFT - draft-iab-ws-environmental-impacts-report

draft-iab-ws-environmental-impacts-report







IAB                                                             J. Arkko
Internet-Draft                                                  Ericsson
Intended status: Informational                             C. S. Perkins
Expires: 25 April 2024                             University of Glasgow
                                                             S. Krishnan
                                                                   Cisco
                                                         23 October 2023


    Report from the IAB Workshop on Environmental Impact of Internet
                     Applications and Systems, 2022
              draft-iab-ws-environmental-impacts-report-03

Abstract

   Internet communications and applications have both environmental
   costs and benefits.  The IAB ran an online workshop in December 2022
   on exploring and understanding these impacts.

   The role of the workshop was to discuss the impacts, discuss the
   evolving needs from industry, and to identify areas for improvements
   and future work.  A key goal of the workshop was to call further
   attention to the topic and to bring together a diverse stakeholder
   community to discuss these issues.

   This report summarises the workshop inputs and discussions.

About This Document

   This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.

   Status information for this document may be found at
   https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-iab-ws-environmental-impacts-
   report/.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.







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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  About the contents of this workshop report  . . . . . . .   4
   2.  Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     2.1.  Practical Arrangements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   3.  Workshop Topics and Discussion  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.1.  The Big Picture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.2.  Understanding the Impacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     3.3.  Improvements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     3.4.  Next Steps  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
       3.4.1.  Overall Strategy  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
       3.4.2.  Improvements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
       3.4.3.  Actions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
   4.  Feedback  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
   6.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   7.  Position Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   8.  Program Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
   9.  Workshop Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
   10. Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  21
   Appendix A.  IAB Members at the Time of Approval  . . . . . . . .  25
   Appendix B.  Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  26
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  26

1.  Introduction

   The IAB ran an online workshop in December 2022 on exploring and
   understanding the environmental impacts of the Internet.




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   The background for the workshop was that Internet communications and
   applications have both environmental costs and benefits.  In the
   positive direction, they can reduce the environmental impact of our
   society, for instance, by allowing virtual interaction to replace
   physical travel.  Of course, the Internet can equally well act as an
   enabler for increasing physical goods consumption, for instance,
   through easing commerce.

   Beyond the effects associated with its use, Internet applications do
   not come for free either.  The Internet runs on systems that require
   energy and raw materials to manufacture and operate.  While the
   environmental benefits of the Internet may certainly outweigh this
   use of resources in many cases, it is incumbent on the Internet
   industry to ensure that this use of resources is minimized and
   optimized.  In many cases, this is already an economic necessity due
   to operational costs.  And because many consumers, businesses, and
   civil societies care deeply about the environmental impact of the
   services and technologies they use, there is also a clear demand for
   providing Internet services with minimal environmental impact.

   The role of the workshop was to discuss the Internet's environmental
   impact, discuss the evolving needs from industry, and to identify
   areas for improvements and future work.  A key goal of the workshop
   was to call further attention to the topic and to bring together a
   diverse stakeholder community to discuss these issues.  This report
   summarises the workshop inputs and discussions.

   The workshop drew many position paper submissions.  Of these, 26 were
   accepted and published to stimulate discussion.  There were active
   discussions both in the meeting and on the workshop mailing list with
   altogether 73 participants.

   Perhaps the main overriding observation is how much there is interest
   and urgency on this topic, among engineers, researchers, and
   businesses.

   The workshop discussions and conclusions are covered in Section 3.
   The position papers, and links to recordings of workshop sessions,
   can be found at https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/e-impact/.
   Presentations held during the discussions can be found from the IETF
   Datatracker at https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/eimpactws/
   meetings/.

   The discussion at the IETF will continue after the workshop, both
   around specific proposals as well as general discussion on a new
   mailing list, the e-impact list (e-impact@ietf.org).  You can
   subscribe to this list at https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/
   e-impact.



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   Some improvements addressing specific situations are being discussed
   at the IETF, such as the Time Variant Routing (TVR) proposal that can
   help optimize connectivity with systems that are periodically on or
   reachable (such as satellites).  We expect more proposals in the
   future.

1.1.  About the contents of this workshop report

   This document is a report on the proceedings of the workshop.  The
   views and positions documented in this report are those expressed
   during the workshop by participants, and do not necessarily reflect
   IAB views and positions.

   Furthermore, the content of the report comes from presentations given
   by workshop participants and notes taken during the discussions,
   without interpretation or validation.  Thus, the content of this
   report follows the flow and dialog of the workshop and documents a
   few next steps and actions, but did not attempt to determine or
   record consensus on these.

2.  Scope

   Environmental impact assessment and improvements are broad topics,
   ranging from technical questions to economics, business decisions,
   and policies.

   The technical, standards, and research communities can help ensure
   that we have a sufficient understanding of the environmental impact
   of the Internet and its applications.  They can also help to design
   the right tools to continue to build and improve all aspects of the
   Internet, such as addressing new functional needs, easing of
   operations, improving performance and/or efficiency, or reducing
   environmental impacts in other ways.

   The workshop was expected to discuss:

   *  The direct environmental impacts of the Internet, including but
      not limited to energy usage by Internet systems themselves (the
      network equipment along with the associated power and cooling
      infrastructure), energy usage of the relevant end-user devices,
      resources needed for manufacturing the associated devices, or the
      environmental impacts throughout the life-cycle of Internet
      systems.  This included discussion about the breakdown of those
      impacts across different system components and operations, and
      predictions about the potential future trends for these impacts
      based on changed usage patterns and emerging technologies.





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   *  Discussion of the indirect environmental impacts of the Internet,
      i.e., its effects on society through enabling communications,
      virtual services, or global commerce.

   *  Sharing information about relevant measurement metrics and data,
      and identify the need for additional metric or measurements.

   *  Discussing about the need for improvements or associated new
      functionality.

   *  Sharing information about the societal, business, and regulatory
      situation, to help identify areas of opportunity.

   *  Identifying areas where further technical work would be most
      impactful.

   *  Discussing specific improvement proposals.

   *  Discussion of past work in the IETF, IRTF, and IAB in this area
      and the status of such work.

   *  Discussion of observed user behaviours as they relate to
      environmental impacts.

   We expected that the workshop discussions connect analysis of the
   issues (e.g., scale of energy consumption or carbon footprint) to
   industry needs (e.g., deployment opportunities) and solutions.

   Business and societal policy questions were in scope only insofar as
   they informed the workshop participants about the context we are in,
   but what those policies should be was not for the workshop to decide
   or even extensively discuss.  The scope excluded also how the
   technical community works and meets, such as the question of in-
   person or hybrid meetings (although it should be noted that the
   workshop itself was run as an on-line meeting).

2.1.  Practical Arrangements

   The IAB discussed a potential workshop in this area during its May
   2022 retreat.  A call for position papers went out in August 2022.
   Position papers were to be submitted by end of October, a deadline
   which was later extended by one week.

   As noted, the workshop itself was run as an on-line meeting, with
   four half-day long sessions complemented by email discussions and the
   position papers submitted by the participants.





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   All in all, 73 people participated in at least one session in the
   workshop.  Participation was by invitation only, based on the
   position paper submissions.

   Every submission was read by at least three members of the program
   committee, and acceptance decisions were communicated back to the
   authors.  Review comments were provided for authors for information,
   and some of the papers were revised before the workshop.

   The program committee decided that due to interest and differing
   areas of expertise, all co-authors were to be invited, and most of
   them did attend.  The program committee also invited a handful of
   additional participants, where they were seen as providing valuable
   input.  Similarly, as is traditional in IAB workshops, the program
   committee members and members of the IAB and IESG were offered an
   opportunity to participate even in cases where they did not submit a
   position paper.

   The IETF secretariat and communications staff provided practical
   support during the process, sending announcements, maintaining the
   workshop web page with position papers, setting up mailing lists,
   tracking submissions, helping with blog article submissions, and so
   on.

3.  Workshop Topics and Discussion

   The meeting part of the workshop was divided into four sessions:

   *  The first session was about the big picture and relationships
      between different aspects of sustainability (see Section 3.1).

   *  The second session focused on what we know and do not know, and
      how we can measure environmental impacts (see Section 3.2).

   *  The third session was about potential improvements (see
      Section 3.3).

   *  The final fourth session was about conclusions and next steps (see
      Section 3.4).

3.1.  The Big Picture

   This session was about the big picture and how the Internet
   influences the rest of the society.  We also spoke about the goals of
   the workshop.






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   The session began with a discussion about what is overall involved in
   this topic.  We also looked at how the IETF has approached this topic
   in the past.

   The discussions also expressed the urgency of action and the
   importance of continuous improvement: an incremental change every
   year is needed for larger savings at the end of the decade.  We
   continued to talk about the need to recognize how climate changes
   impact different communities in the world, often unfairly.  Finally,
   we focused on the need to be aware of carbon footprint rather than
   pure energy consumption - carbon intensity of energy sources varies.

   The starting observation from this session was that the issue is much
   bigger than Internet technology alone.  The issue influences all
   parts of society, and even matters such as (in)equality, externalized
   costs, and justice.  Another key observation was that improvements
   come in many forms; there is no silver bullet.  The opportunity to
   bring together people with different backgrounds helped us see how we
   approach the topic from different angles - none of them wrong, but
   also none of the sole angle to focus on either.  Only the combined
   effects of complementary efforts can provide the required level of
   changes.

   Some of the useful tools for approaching the issue included of course
   technical solutions, but also solidarity, aiming for sufficiency, and
   awareness.  It is important to not stand still waiting for the
   perfect solution.  Renewable energy and carbon awareness were seen as
   a part of the solution, but not, however, sufficient by themselves.

   As an example demonstration of the diversity of angles and
   improvements relating to environmental issues, the figure below
   classifies the areas that workshop position papers fell on:



















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             +---- Actors & organizations
             |                                 +---- Avoidance
             +---- Benefits to other fields    |
             |                                 +---- User behaviour
             +---- Society, awareness, &       |
             |     justice                     +---- Implementation
             |                                 |
   Workshop -+- Improvements ------------------+
             |                                 |
             |     Understanding &             |       +---- Dataplane
             +---- Measurements                |       |
                         |                 Protocols --+---- Routing
                         |                             |
                         +---- Energy                  +---- Edge cloud
                         |                             |
                         +---- Carbon                  +---- Mobile
                                                       |
                                                       +---- Metrics
                                                       |
                                                       +---- Other


         Figure 1: Position paper submission topics

   Some of the goals for the IETF should include:

   *  Connecting the IETF with others.  Given that the issue is broad,
      it is difficult for one standards organisation alone to make a
      significant impact, or even have the full picture.  Working in
      collaboration with others is necessary.  And understanding the
      situation beyond technology will be needed.

   *  Continuous improvement.  It is important that the IETF (among
      others) sets itself on a continuous improvement cycle.  No single
      improvement will change the overall situation sufficiently, but
      over a longer period of time, even smaller changes every year will
      result in larger improvements.

   *  Finding the right targets for improvements in the Internet.  These
      should perhaps not be solely defined by larger speeds or bigger
      capacity, but rather increased usefulness to society and declining
      emissions from the information and communications technology (ICT)
      sector.

   *  Specifying what research needs to be done, i.e., where additional
      knowledge would allow us to find better improvements.  For
      instance, not enough is known about environmental impacts beyond
      energy, such as natural resources used for manufacturing, or the



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      use of water.  Carbon-awareness and measurements across domains is
      also poorly understood today.  And business model impacts -- such
      as the role of advertising on Internet's carbon footprint --
      deserve more study.

3.2.  Understanding the Impacts

   The second session focused on what we know and do not know, and how
   we can measure environmental impacts.

   The initial presentation focused on narrowing down the lower and
   upper limits of the energy use of the Internet and putting some
   common but erroneous claims into context.  There was also discussion
   regarding the energy consumption of the ICT sector and how it
   compares to some other selected industries such as aviation.

   Dwelling deeper into the energy consumption and the carbon footprint
   of the ICT sector there was discussion regarding how the impact was
   split amongst the networks, data centres and user devices (with the
   user devices appearing to contribute to the largest fraction of the
   impact).  Also, while lot of the energy consumption related studies
   and discussions have been focused on data centers, some studies
   suggested that data center energy usage is still a small fraction of
   energy use as compared to residential and commercial buildings.

   There were also further discussions both during the presentations and
   in the hallway chats regarding the press and media coverage of the
   potential environment technologies.  The overall sense of the
   participants seemed to be that there was a lot of sensational
   headlines, but they were not really backed by measurements done by
   the industry and academia, and were fraught with errors.  Some of
   these media reports were off by quite a bit, sometimes even by an
   order of magnitude (e.g., confusing MBps vs Mbps in calculations).
   The potential harm is having widely circulating misinformation was
   noted; it can hinder realistic efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

   In the rest of the session we looked at both additional data
   collected from the operators as well as factors that - depending on
   circumstances - may drive energy consumption.  These include for
   instance peak capacity and energy proportionality.

   If energy consumption is little affected by offered load, the ratio
   of peak capacity to typical usage becomes a critical factor in energy
   consumption.  On the other hand, systems with energy proportionality
   scale their resource and energy consumption more dynamically based on
   offered load.  The lack of energy proportionality in many parts of
   the network infrastructure was noted, along with the potential gains
   if it can be improved.



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   There were also observations that showed that the energy consumption
   grew as a step function when the peak capacity was reached (even
   instantaneously) and additional capacity was built up by performing
   network upgrades to handle these new peaks.  This resulted in a
   overall higher baseline energy consumption even when the average
   demand did not change that much.  Thus, the ability to shift load to
   reduce peak demand was highlighted as a potential way to delay
   increases in consumption when energy proportionality is lacking.

3.3.  Improvements

   The third session was about potential improvements.

   As noted earlier, there are many different types of improvements.  In
   the discussion we focused mostly on protocol aspects, and looked at
   metrics, telemetry, routing, multicast, and data encoding formats.

   The initial two presentations focused on metrics and telemetry with
   the premise that visibility is a very important first step
   (paraphrasing Peter Drucker's mantra of "You cannot improve what you
   don't measure").  There was a discussion of the scopes of emissions
   and it seemed that from a networking vendor perspective, while
   directly controlled emissions and emissions from purchased energy are
   easily measurable, emissions from across the entire value chain can
   be much larger.  Thus it seemed important that the networking vendors
   had to put in effort into helping their customers measure and
   mitigate their environmental impact as well.  The need for
   standardized metrics was very clear as it helps avoid proprietary,
   redundant and even contradictory metrics across vendors.

   The initial and the near-term focus was related to metrics and
   techniques related to energy consumption of the networking devices
   themselves while the longer term focus can go into topics much
   further removed from the IETF such as packaging, circular design in
   order to form a more holistic picture.  The overall feeling was that
   the topic of metrics, telemetry, and management are quite specific
   and could be targets to be worked on in the IETF in the near term.

   The next part of the discussion highlighted the need to understand
   the trade-offs involved in changing forwarding decisions - such as
   increased jitter and stretch.  Jitter is about delay fluctuation
   between packets in a stream [RFC4689].  Stretch is defined as the
   difference between the absolute shortest path traffic could take
   through the network and the path the traffic actually takes
   [RFC7980].  Impacts on jitter and stretch point to the need for
   careful design and analysis of improvements from a system
   perspective, to ensure that the intended effect is indeed reached
   across the entire system, and is not only a local optimum.



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   We also talked about the potentially significant impact, provided the
   network exhibits energy proportionality, of using efficient binary
   formats instead of textual representations when carrying data in
   protocols.  This is something that can be relatively easily adopted
   in new protocols as they are developed.  Indeed, some recently
   finished protocols such as HTTP/2 have already chosen to use this
   technique [RFC7540].  General-purpose binary formats such as Concise
   Binary Object Representation (CBOR) [RFC8949] are also available for
   use.

   There were also some interesting discussions regarding the use of
   multicast and whether it would help or hurt on the energy efficiency
   of communications.  There were some studies and simulations that
   showed the potential gains to be had but they were to be balanced
   against some of the well known barriers to deployment of multicast.
   We also heard from a leading Content Delivery Network (CDN) operator
   regarding their views on multicast and how it relates to media usage
   and consumption models.  The hallway conversations also talked about
   the potential negative effects of multicast in wireless and
   constrained networks.  Overall the conclusion was that the use of
   multicast can potentially provide some savings but only in some
   specific scenarios.

   For all improvements, the importance of metrics was frequently
   highlighted to ensure changes lead to a meaningful reduction in
   overall system carbon footprint.

3.4.  Next Steps

   The final fourth session was about conclusions and next steps.  This
   section highlights some of these conclusions.

3.4.1.  Overall Strategy

   While only a few things are easy, the road ahead for making
   improvements seems clear: we need to continue to improve our
   understanding of the environmental impact, and have a continuous
   cycle of improvements that lead not just to better energy efficiency
   but to reduced overall carbon emissions.  The IETF can play an
   important part in this process, but of course there are other aspects
   beyond protocols.










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   On understanding our environmental impact the first step is better
   awareness of sustainability issues in general, which helps us
   understand better where our issues are.  The second step is
   willigness to understand in detail what the causes and relationships
   are within our issues.  What parts, components, or behaviours in the
   network cause what kinds of impacts?  An overall drive in the society
   to report and improve environmental impacts can be helpful in
   creating a willingness to get to this information.

   On establishing a continuous cycle of improvements, the ability to
   understand where we are, making improvements, and then seeing the
   impact of those improvements is of course central.  But obviously a
   key question is what are the potential improvements, and how can we
   accelerate them?  It should be noted that quick, large changes are
   not likely.  But a continuous stream of smaller changes can create a
   large impact over a longer period of time.

   One of the key realizations from this workshop was that the problem
   to be solved is very large, complex and that there is no single
   solution that fixes everything.  There are some solutions that could
   help in the near term and others that would only show benefits over
   longer periods, but they are both necessary.

   One further challenge is that due to the size and complexity of the
   problem, it was very likely that there might be varying opinions on
   what KPIs need to be measured and improved.

3.4.2.  Improvements

   In looking at potential improvements, it is essential that any
   associated tradeoffs can be understood (note that not all
   improvements do indeed entail a tradeoff).

   Importantly, the role of the Internet in improving other areas of
   society must not be diminished.  Understanding the costs and benefits
   requires taking a holistic view of energy consumption, focussing not
   just on the carbon footprint of the Internet but of the broader
   systems in which it is used.  For instance, discussion in session
   three revealed how some changes might impact latency and jitter.
   Given that these characteristics are an important factor how virtual
   meetings are perceived by potential participants, it is important
   that the performance of networks satisfies these participants at a
   level where there's willingness to use them over other potentially
   more environmentally harmful methods, such as travel.  Focussing
   solely on the carbon footprint of the Internet, or solely on the
   carbon footprint of travel, risks missing the bigger picture
   potential savings.




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   Note that while virtual meetings are a common example, it is
   important to consider different use cases, some of which may not be
   as obvious to us human users as meetings are.  Improvements may bring
   different or even larger impacts in other situations, e.g., Internet
   connected electronics might benefit from different characteristics
   than human users, e.g., with regards to support for intermittent
   connectivity.

   The relationships between different system components and the impact
   of various detailed design choices in networks is not always
   apparent.  A local change in one node may have an impact in other
   nodes.  When considering environmental sustainability, in most cases
   the overall system impact is what counts more than local impacts.  Of
   course, other factors, such as device battery life and availability
   of power may result in other preferences, such as optimising for low
   power usage of end-user devices, even at the cost of increases
   elsewhere.

   In terms of useful tools for building improvements, the following
   were highlighted in discussions:

   *  Masures beyond protocol design, such as implementations or
      renewable energy use.  Not everything is about protocols.

   *  Metrics, measurements, and data are very beneficial.  Carbon-aware
      metrics would in particular be very useful.  All additional
      information makes us more aware of what the environmental impacts
      are, but also enables optimization, AI-based adjustments, or
      carbon-directed computing and networking tools, and so on.

   *  It would be beneficial to be able to provide various systems a
      more dynamic ability to slow down and sleep.  Awareness of energy
      availability and type would also allow us to employ time and place
      shifting for reducing carbon impacts.

   *  When we design systems, paying attention to the used data formats
      may pay off significantly, as argued in [Moran].

   *  Possibly there’s a new opportunity for deploying multicast as well
      [Navarre].

   *  Designing systems for energy constrained situations may actually
      make the resulting systems work well in several environments.








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3.4.3.  Actions

   The workshop discussed a number of possible actions.  These actions
   are not about how to take specific technical solutions forward, but
   rather about how to discuss the topic going forward or what technical
   areas to focus on:

   *  We need to continue the discussion – not all questions are
      answered.  Additional discussion within the IETF will be needed.
      Continuing to connect the IETF with others in society and other
      SDOs around this topic is also useful.

   *  It is useful to find a role and a scope for IETF work in this
      area.  The IETF will not develop alternative energy sources, work
      on social issues or have detailed discussions about implementation
      strategies or electronics design.  However, the IETF has a role in
      measurement mechanisms, protocol design and standards -- but of
      course activities in this role need to be aware of other aspects,
      such as implementation strategies.

   *  Increase our understanding of the environmental impacts of
      Internet technologies.  One discussion topic during the workshop
      was also whether each new RFC should dedicate a section to discuss
      the these impacts.  No conclusion was drawn about the way to
      document these in RFCs, but it is clear that the IETF community
      will need to understand the environmental issues better.  (Perhaps
      in addition to learning about the actual issues, guidelines for
      analysing protocols with regards to their impacts could be
      useful.)

   *  IETF activities on specific technologies are already ongoing or
      starting, such as metrics discussed, for instance, at the NMRG
      research group [NMRG] or the OPSAWG working group [OPSAWG], or the
      new Time Variant Routing (TVR) working group [TVR].  It may be
      also useful to start from picking the low-hanging fruits, such as:

      -  Focusing on improving energy proportionality and the consequent
         use of efficient data formats.

      -  Avoiding crypto assets - such as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and
         cryptocurrencies.

      -  Being able to carry information that needs to be shared for the
         purposes of enabling load and time shifting.

   *  Help initiate research activities that address some of the issues,
      such as broader gathering and sharing of measurement data,
      analysis of this data and looking at business related issues such



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      as the impact of peering or advertising impacts sustainability.
      In addition, there may be a need to look at research for specific
      areas of improvements that are promising but not ready for
      standards discussion.

   In summary, the goals that the IETF should have include:

   *  Full understanding of the Internet’s environmental impact.

   *  Continuous improvement of our technology.

   *  Launching research relevant activities.

   To support these goals the IAB has created the eimpact program
   [EIMPACT] as a venue for further discussions concerning environmental
   impacts and sustainability of Internet technology.

4.  Feedback

   The organizers received generally positive feedback about the
   workshop.

   One practical issue from the organizer's point of view was that due
   to the extension of the deadline, the final submissions and paper
   reviews collided in part with the IETF-115 meeting.  This led to it
   being very difficult for the program committee and practical
   organization staff to find time for the activity.  We recommend
   avoiding such collisions in the future.

5.  Security Considerations

   The workshop itself did not address specific security topics.  Of
   course, individual changes in Internet technology or operations that
   influence environmental impacts may also influence security aspects.
   These need to be looked at for every proposed change.

   Such influence on security may come in different forms.  For
   instance:

   *  A mechanism that makes, for instance, energy consumption
      information available may be susceptible to tampering or providing
      false information.  For instance, [McDaniel] argues that economics
      and history shows that different players will attempt to cheat if
      a benefit can be acrued by doing so, e.g., by misreporting.  As a
      result, sustainability measures and systems must be modeled as
      systems under threat.





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   *  A mechanism that allows control of network elements for
      optimization purposes may be misused to cause denial-of-service or
      other types of attacks.

   *  Avoiding the use of crypto assets where other mechanisms suffice.

   *  Streamlining what data is sent may improve privacy if less
      information is shared.

6.  IANA Considerations

   This document has no IANA actions.

7.  Position Papers

   The following position papers were submitted to the workshop:

   *  Chris Adams, Stefano Salsano, Hesham ElBakoury: "Extending IPv6 to
      support Carbon Aware Networking" [Adams]

   *  Per Anderson, Suresh Krishnan, Jan Lindblad, Snezana Mitrovic,
      Marisol Palmero, Esther Roure, Gonzalo Salgueiro: "Sustainability
      Telemetry" [Anderson]

   *  Jari Arkko, Nina Lövehagen, Pernilla Bergmark: "Environmental
      Impacts of the Internet: Scope, Improvements, and Challenges"
      [Arkko]

   *  R.  Bolla, R.  Bruschi, F.  Davoli, C.  Lombardo, Beatrice
      Siccardi: "6Green: Green Technologies for 5/6G Service- Based
      Architectures" [Bolla]

   *  Alexander Clemm, Lijun Dong, Greg Mirsky, Laurent Ciavaglia, Jeff
      Tantsura, Marie-Paule Odini: "Green Networking Metrics" [ClemmA]

   *  Alexander Clemm, Cedric Westphal, Jeff Tantsura, Laurent
      Ciavaglia, Marie-Paule Odini : "Challenges and Opportunities in
      Green Networking" [ClemmB]

   *  Toerless Eckert, Mohamed Boucadair, Pascal Thubert, Jeff Tantsura:
      "IETF and Energy – An Overview" [Eckert]

   *  Greening of Streaming: "Tune In.  Turn On.  Cut Back.  Finding the
      optimal streaming 'default' mode to increase energy efficiency,
      shift consumer expectations, and safeguard choice" [GOS]

   *  Romain Jacob: "Towards a power-proportional Internet" [Jacob]




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   *  Fieke Jansen and Maya Richman: "Environment, internet
      infrastructure, and digital rights" [Jansen]

   *  Michael King, Suresh Krishnan, Carlos Pignataro, Pascal Thubert,
      Eric Voit: "On Principles for a Sustainability Stack" [King]

   *  Suresh Krishnan, Carlos Pignataro: "Sustainability considerations
      for networking equipment" [Krishnan]

   *  Jukka Manner: "Sustainability Considerations" [Manner]

   *  Vesna Manojlovic: "Internet Infrastructure and Climate Justice"
      [Manojlovic]

   *  Mike Mattera: "Understanding the Full Emissions Impact from
      Internet Traffic" [Mattera]

   *  John Preuß Mattsson: "Environmental Impact of Crypto-Assets"
      [Mattsson]

   *  Brendan Moran, Henk Birkholz, Carsten Bormann: "CBOR is Greener
      than JSON" [Moran]

   *  Louis Navarre, Franoçis Michel, Olivier Bonaventure: "It is time
      to reconsider multicast" [Navarre]

   *  Bruce Nordman: "Applying Internet Architecture to Energy Systems"
      [Nordman]

   *  Alvaro Retana, Russ White, Manuel Paul: "A Framework and
      Requirements for Energy Aware Control Planes" [Retana]

   *  Shayna Robinson, Remy Hellstern, Mariana Diaz: "Sea Change:
      Prioritizing the Environment in Internet Architecture" [Robinson]

   *  Daniel Schien, Paul Shabajee, Chris Preist: "Rethinking Allocation
      in High-Baseload Systems: A Demand-Proportional Network
      Electricity Intensity Metric" [Schien]

   *  Eve M.  Schooler, Rick Taylor, Noa Zilberman, Robert Soulé, Dawn
      Nafus, Rajit Manohar, Uri Cummings: "A Perspective on Carbon-aware
      Networking" [Schooler]

   *  Selome Kostentinos Tesfatsion, Xuejun Cai, Arif Ahmed: "End-to-end
      Energy Efficiency at Service-level in Edge Cloud" [Kostentinos]

   *  Pascal Thubert: "Digital Twin and Automation" [Thubert]




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   *  Wim Vanderbauwhede: "Frugal Computing" [Vanderbauwhede]

   *  Michael Welzl, Ozgu Alay, Peyman Teymoori, Safiqul Islam:
      "Reducing Green House Gas Emissions With Congestion Control“
      [Welzl]

8.  Program Committee

   The program committee members were:

   *  Jari Arkko, Ericsson (program committee co-chair)

   *  Lars Eggert, Netapp (program committee co-chair)

   *  Colin Perkins, University of Glasgow (program committee co-chair)

   *  Luis M.  Contreras, Telefónica

   *  Toerless Eckert, Futurewei

   *  Martin Flack, Akamai

   *  Mike Mattera, Akamai

   *  Barath Raghavan, USC

   *  Daniel Schien,University of Bristol

   *  Eve M.  Schooler, Intel

   *  Rick Taylor, Ori Industries

9.  Workshop Participants

   The participants who attended at least one of the four sessions were:

   *  Alex Clemm

   *  Ali Rezaki

   *  Arif Ahmed

   *  Beatrice Siccardi

   *  Brendan Moran

   *  Bruce Nordman




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   *  Carlos Pignataro

   *  Carsten Bormann

   *  Cedric Westphal

   *  Chiara Lombardo

   *  Chris Adams

   *  Colin Perkins

   *  Daniel Schien

   *  Dawn Nafus

   *  Dom Robinson

   *  Eric Voit

   *  Eric Vyncke

   *  Esther Roure Vila

   *  Eve M.  Schooler

   *  Fieke Jansen

   *  Franco Davoli

   *  Gonzalo Salgueiro

   *  Greg Mirsky

   *  Henk Birkholz

   *  Hesham ElBakoury

   *  Hosein Badran

   *  Iankang Yao

   *  Jan Lindblad

   *  Jari Arkko

   *  Jens Malmodin




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   *  Jiankang Yao

   *  John Preuß Mattsson

   *  Jukka Manner

   *  Julien Maisonneuve

   *  Kristin Moyer

   *  Lars Eggert

   *  Laurent Ciavaglia

   *  Lijun Dong

   *  Louis Navarre

   *  Louise Krug

   *  Luis M.  Contreras

   *  Marisol Palmero Amador

   *  Martin Flack

   *  Maya Richman

   *  Michael Welzl

   *  Mike Mattera

   *  Mohamed Boucadair

   *  Nina Lövehagen

   *  Noa Zilberman

   *  Olivier Bonaventure

   *  Pascal Thubert

   *  Paul Shabajee

   *  Per Andersson

   *  Pernilla Bergmark




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   *  Peyman Teymoori

   *  Qin Wu

   *  Remy Hellstern

   *  Rick Taylor

   *  Rob WIlton

   *  Rob Wilton

   *  Romain Jacob

   *  Russ White

   *  Safiqul Islam

   *  Selome Kostentinos Tesfatsion

   *  Shayna Robinson

   *  Snezana Mitrovic

   *  Stefano Salsano

   *  Suresh Krishnan

   *  Tirumaleswar Reddy

   *  Toerless Eckert

   *  Uri Cummings

   *  Vesna Manojlovic

   *  Wim Vanderbauwhede

10.  Informative References

   [Adams]    Adams, C., Salsano, S., and H. ElBakoury, "Extending IPv6
              to support Carbon Aware Networking", Position paper in the
              IAB Workshop on Environmental Impacts of Internet
              Applications and Systems , December 2022.







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   [Anderson] Anderson, P., Krishnan, S., Lindblad, J., Mitrovic, S.,
              Palmero, M., Roure, E., and G. Salgueiro, "Sustainability
              Telemetry", Position paper in the IAB Workshop on
              Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications and
              Systems , December 2022.

   [Arkko]    Arkko, J., Lövehagen, N., and P. Bergmark, "Environmental
              Impacts of the Internet: Scope, Improvements, and
              Challenges", Position paper in the IAB Workshop on
              Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications and
              Systems , December 2022.

   [Bolla]    Bolla, R., Bruschi, R., Davoli, F., Lombardo, C., and
              Beatrice Siccardi, "6Green: Green Technologies for 5/6G
              Service- Based Architectures", Position paper in the IAB
              Workshop on Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications
              and Systems , December 2022.

   [ClemmA]   Clemm, A., Dong, L., Mirsky, G., Ciavaglia, L., Tantsura,
              J., and M. Odini, "Green Networking Metrics", Position
              paper in the IAB Workshop on Environmental Impacts of
              Internet Applications and Systems , December 2022.

   [ClemmB]   Clemm, A., Westphal, C., Tantsura, J., Ciavaglia, L.,
              Odini, M., and M. Welzl, "Challenges and Opportunities in
              Green Networking", Position paper in the IAB Workshop on
              Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications and
              Systems , December 2022.

   [Eckert]   Eckert, T., Boucadair, M., Thubert, P., and J. Tantsura,
              "IETF and Energy – An Overview", Position paper in the IAB
              Workshop on Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications
              and Systems , December 2022.

   [EIMPACT]  IAB, "Environmental Impacts of Internet Technology", IAB
              Program, see https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/eimpact ,
              August 2023.

   [GOS]      Greening of Streaming, "Tune In. Turn On. Cut Back.
              Finding the optimal streaming 'default' mode to increase
              energy efficiency, shift consumer expectations, and
              safeguard choice", Position paper in the IAB Workshop on
              Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications and
              Systems , December 2022.







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   [Jacob]    Jacob, R., "Towards a power-proportional Internet",
              Position paper in the IAB Workshop on Environmental
              Impacts of Internet Applications and Systems , December
              2022.

   [Jansen]   Jansen, F. and M. Richman, "Environment, internet
              infrastructure, and digital rights", Position paper in the
              IAB Workshop on Environmental Impacts of Internet
              Applications and Systems , December 2022.

   [King]     King, M., Krishnan, S., Pignataro, C., Thubert, P., and E.
              Voit, "On Principles for a Sustainability Stack", Position
              paper in the IAB Workshop on Environmental Impacts of
              Internet Applications and Systems , December 2022.

   [Kostentinos]
              Tesfatsion, S., Cai, X., and A. Ahmed, "End-to-end Energy
              Efficiency at Service-level in Edge Cloud", Position paper
              in the IAB Workshop on Environmental Impacts of Internet
              Applications and Systems , December 2022.

   [Krishnan] Krishnan, S. and C. Pignataro, "Sustainability
              considerations for networking equipment", Position paper
              in the IAB Workshop on Environmental Impacts of Internet
              Applications and Systems , December 2022.

   [Manner]   Manner, J., "Sustainability Considerations", Position
              paper in the IAB Workshop on Environmental Impacts of
              Internet Applications and Systems , December 2022.

   [Manojlovic]
              Manojlovic, V., "Internet Infrastructure and Climate
              Justice", Position paper in the IAB Workshop on
              Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications and
              Systems , December 2022.

   [Mattera]  Mattera, M., "Understanding the Full Emissions Impact from
              Internet Traffic", Position paper in the IAB Workshop on
              Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications and
              Systems , December 2022.

   [Mattsson] Mattsson, J. P., "Environmental Impact of Crypto-Assets",
              Position paper in the IAB Workshop on Environmental
              Impacts of Internet Applications and Systems , December
              2022.






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   [McDaniel] McDaniel, P., "Sustainability is a Security Problem", ACM
              Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) ,
              November 2022.

   [Moran]    Moran, B., Birkholz, H., and C. Bormann, "CBOR is Greener
              than JSON", Position paper in the IAB Workshop on
              Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications and
              Systems , December 2022.

   [Navarre]  Navarre, L., Michel, F., and O. Bonaventure, "It is time
              to reconsider multicast", Position paper in the IAB
              Workshop on Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications
              and Systems , December 2022.

   [NMRG]     IRTF, "Network Management Research Group (NMRG)", IRTF
              Research Group, see https://irtf.org/nmrg , March 1999.

   [Nordman]  Nordman, B., "Applying Internet Architecture to Energy
              Systems", Position paper in the IAB Workshop on
              Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications and
              Systems , December 2022.

   [OPSAWG]   IETF, "Operations and Management Area Working Group
              (OPSAWG)", IETF Working Group, see
              https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/opsawg/about/ , June 2007.

   [Retana]   Retana, A., White, R., and M. Paul, "A Framework and
              Requirements for Energy Aware Control Planes", Position
              paper in the IAB Workshop on Environmental Impacts of
              Internet Applications and Systems , December 2022.

   [RFC4689]  Poretsky, S., Perser, J., Erramilli, S., and S. Khurana,
              "Terminology for Benchmarking Network-layer Traffic
              Control Mechanisms", RFC 4689, DOI 10.17487/RFC4689,
              October 2006, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4689>.

   [RFC7540]  Belshe, M., Peon, R., and M. Thomson, Ed., "Hypertext
              Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2)", RFC 7540,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC7540, May 2015,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7540>.

   [RFC7980]  Behringer, M., Retana, A., White, R., and G. Huston, "A
              Framework for Defining Network Complexity", RFC 7980,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC7980, October 2016,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7980>.






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   [RFC8949]  Bormann, C. and P. Hoffman, "Concise Binary Object
              Representation (CBOR)", STD 94, RFC 8949,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC8949, December 2020,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8949>.

   [Robinson] Robinson, S., Hellstern, R., and M. Diaz, "Sea Change:
              Prioritizing the Environment in Internet Architecture",
              Position paper in the IAB Workshop on Environmental
              Impacts of Internet Applications and Systems , December
              2022.

   [Schien]   Schien, D., Shabajee, P., and C. Preist, "Rethinking
              Allocation in High-Baseload Systems: A Demand-Proportional
              Network Electricity Intensity Metric", Position paper in
              the IAB Workshop on Environmental Impacts of Internet
              Applications and Systems , December 2022.

   [Schooler] Schooler, E. M., Taylor, R., Zilberman, N., Soulé, R.,
              Nafus, D., Manohar, R., and U. Cummings, "A Perspective on
              Carbon-aware Networking", Position paper in the IAB
              Workshop on Environmental Impacts of Internet Applications
              and Systems , December 2022.

   [Thubert]  Thubert, P., "Digital Twin and Automation", Position paper
              in the IAB Workshop on Environmental Impacts of Internet
              Applications and Systems , December 2022.

   [TVR]      IESG, "Time-Variant Routing (TVR)", IETF Working Group,
              see https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/tvr/about/ ,
              February 2023.

   [Vanderbauwhede]
              Vanderbauwhede, W., "Frugal Computing", Position paper in
              the IAB Workshop on Environmental Impacts of Internet
              Applications and Systems , December 2022.

   [Welzl]    Welzl, M., Alay, O., Teymoori, P., and S. Islam, "Reducing
              Green House Gas Emissions With Congestion Control",
              Position paper in the IAB Workshop on Environmental
              Impacts of Internet Applications and Systems , December
              2022.

Appendix A.  IAB Members at the Time of Approval

   Internet Architecture Board members at the time this document was
   approved for publication were:

   *  Dhruv Dhody, Huawei



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   *  Lars Eggert, NetApp

   *  Wes Hardaker, USC/ISI

   *  Cullen Jennings, Cisco Systems

   *  Mallory Knodel, Center for Democracy and Technology

   *  Suresh Krishnan, Cisco

   *  Mirja Kühlewind, Ericsson

   *  Tommy Pauly, Apple

   *  Alvaro Retana, Futurewei

   *  David Schinazi, Google

   *  Christopher Wood, Cloudflare

   *  Qin Wu, Huawei Technologies

   *  Jiankang Yao, CNNIC China Internet Network Information Center

Appendix B.  Acknowledgments

   Naturally, most of the credit goes to the workshop participants.

   The organizers wish to thank Cindy Morgan and Greg Wood for their
   work on the practical arrangements and communications relating to he
   workshop.  This report was greatly enhanced by the feedback provided
   on it, thanks to Michael Welzl in particular for his detailed review.

Authors' Addresses

   Jari Arkko
   Ericsson
   Email: jari.arkko@ericsson.com


   Colin Perkins
   University of Glasgow
   Email: csp@csperkins.org


   Suresh Krishnan
   Cisco
   Email: suresh.krishnan@gmail.com



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