IEEE

Scope

The IEEE has been addressing the subject of sustainability under the scope of communications and infrastructure. For that, under the leadership of the IEEE Standards Association Industry Connections platform, it developed the “Sustainable Infrastructures and Community Development Program”, along with the “Sustainable ICT” initiative, launched in 2015. Additionally, nine working groups were formed from that initiative that addressed standards development in specific aspects of the ICT domain. The aspects pursued therein range from IEEE-specific communication technologies to other mechanisms that impact them, such as virtualisation and big data.

Summary

The nine Working Groups developed under the scope of the IEEE Sustainable ICT were brought up as Projects Authorisation Requests (PARs), which is the IEEE precursor procedure for effective standard development:

  • P1922.1 – Standard for a method for calculating anticipated emissions caused by virtual machine migration and placement. Evaluate the anticipated emissions related to a VM migration towards available servers and consider such emissions as a parameter to be minimised in a migration strategy.
  • P1922.2 – Standard for a method to calculate near real-time emissions of information and communication technology infrastructure. Allow near real-time evaluation of ICT infrastructure usage phase emissions by considering the temporal fluctuations in emissions from electricity generation.
  • P1923.1 – Standard for computation of energy efficiency upper bound for apparatus processing communication signal waveforms. Evaluate communication signal waveforms’ potential for energy efficiency.
  • P1924.1 – Recommended practice for developing energy-efficient power-proportional digital architectures. Offer guidelines for designers and developers of digital architectures to ensure power is consumed solely during useful computational work.
  • P1925.1 – Standard for Energy Efficient Dynamic Line Rate Transmission System. Create a new energy-efficient transmission system.
  • P1926.1 – Standard for a Functional Architecture of Distributed Energy Efficient Big Data Processing. Enhance the energy efficiency of data networks processing and transmitting big data. Managing the substantial data volumes produced by big data applications necessitates a mechanism to balance the trade-offs between transmission and processing regarding energy consumption.
  • P1927.1 – Standard for Services Provided by the Energy-efficient Orchestration and Management of Virtualised Distributed Data Centers Interconnected by a Virtualised Network.  Provide an energy-efficient networked data centre service through the joint network and data centre virtualisation.
  • P1928.1 – Standard for a Mechanism for Energy-Efficient Virtual Machine Placement. Facilitate energy-efficient information processing by considering both processing requirements and network power consumption.
  • P1929.1 – An Architectural Framework for Energy-Efficient Content Distribution. Create a framework for the design of energy-efficient content distribution mechanisms for various service and networking scenarios.

 

Several of these working groups have produced draft standards associated with their outcomes. Concretely, P1922.2, P1923.1 and P1924.1 have produced draft versions of the standards but haven’t received any updates since 2019, 2020 and 2021, respectively. Such behaviour is evidence that the workgroups have been concluded. Regarding P1927.1, the standard is in the ballot process (review, amendment and approval stages). The remainder, 1925.1, 1926.1, 1928.1 and 1928.1 are still being reviewed and finalised for the ballot process. The 1922.1 working group is still under formation.
Additionally, under the scope of the IEEE GreenICT, a new PAR regarding Machine Learning is being drafted.

Relevance for EXIGENCE

The different capabilities at which IEEE impacts provides a domain of its own that needs to be addressed within EXIGENCE. Evidence of industrial digitalisation raise several scenarios where, e.g., Wi-Fi is preferable against a local/private cellular connection, for establishing connectivity under stringent scenarios (such as inside factories’ floors). Moreover, the existing working groups are also addressing supportive arenas (e.g., big data, virtualisation), whose insights can increment or complement discussion being held under scope of other SDOs and types of access networks, with potential impact in EXIGENCE contributions. However, as some of the working groups have already finished their work, and the direct participation in the standards is closed to directly participating members, it will be complex to not only have access to the produced information, but to influence therein as well.

Index