As digital services continue to expand, the energy footprint of network infrastructures has become a growing concern. From video streaming to cloud applications, data traffic consumes significant amounts of energy across multiple network domains. Yet, this consumption often remains invisible to both users and service providers.
To address this challenge, recent efforts within the GREEN IETF WG are advancing practical methods to measure, expose, and optimise energy usage in network domain. This blog post presents an upcoming hackathon initiative, initially explored during the IETF 123 Hackathon, focusing on real measurement, service-level energy attribution, and awareness-driven efficiency.
Toward Service-Level Energy Awareness
Traditional energy-efficiency approaches often focus on infrastructure optimisation without directly involving users. However, this can lead to rebound effects, where efficiency gains are offset by increased usage.
EXIGENCE shifts the focus toward service-level energy awareness, aiming to:
- Provide transparent energy consumption data to users and providers
- Enable informed decision-making based on ecological impact
- Encourage behavioural changes through awareness and incentives
By exposing energy information at the service level, users can better understand the environmental footprint of their digital activities.
Integration Across Network Domains
The proposed EXIGENCE architecture aims to collect, aggregate, and attribute energy consumption across multiple domains, including:
- Radio access networks
- Transport networks
- Data center infrastructures
To ensure interoperability, EXIGENCE leverages standardised data models that enable a consistent representation and exchange of energy-related information (ecodata) across domains.
This approach aligns with ongoing work in standardisation bodies such as the IETF, where efforts are underway to define frameworks and protocols for energy-aware networking. In this domain, standard data models such as YANG facilitate inter-domain and intra-domain energy information exchange.
A Practical Setup for Energy Measurement in Transport Domain
At the core of this hackathon is an experimental setup designed to capture and compare energy consumption across network elements in Telefónica Network and Automation Lab. The platform consists of:
- Two routers handling distinct traffic flows.
- A Smart Power Distribution Unit (PDU) measuring physical energy consumption from the entire device.
- Router-level reporting through the Command Line Interface (CLI) tool.
- A traffic generator injecting flows with varying throughput.
This multi-source measurement approach allows developers to compare energy metrics reported by the device with external measurements from the Smart PDU.
Key Activities of the Hackathon
The hackathon focuses on three main activities aimed at improving how energy consumption is understood and communicated:
1. Comparing Energy Data Sources
By collecting energy metrics from both the routers themselves and the Smart PDU, participants can evaluate the consistency and accuracy of energy-reporting mechanisms that may differ in measurement scope, granularity, or reporting frequency. This comparison helps identify discrepancies and potential improvements in device-level telemetry.
2. Energy Attribution per Traffic Flow
A key challenge in networking is linking energy consumption to specific services or traffic flows. In this hackathon, energy usage is analysed in relation to throughput, enabling proportional attribution of energy to individual flows. This capability is essential for understanding the true cost of services such as video streaming or data transfer.
3. Impact of Sleep Mode Capabilities
Modern routers increasingly support energy-saving features such as sleep modes. The hackathon will assess how these features affect overall energy consumption, as reported by both internal and external sources.
Conclusion
This hackathon setup represents an important step towards energy-aware networking by combining real measurement, standardised data models, and service-level visibility. By comparing different sources of energy data, attributing consumption to specific traffic flows, and evaluating energy-saving features like sleep modes, the hackathon will provide valuable insights into how networks consume energy.
More importantly, it moves beyond infrastructure-centric efficiency and introduces a user-centered perspective. By exposing energy information and enabling greater awareness, the approach aims to reduce environmental impact and promote more sustainable digital behaviour.
See you at IETF 126 Hackathon in Vienna!!
Author
Telefonica Innovation Digital
Luis M. Contreras, Ph.D, is with Telefónica Innovación Digital / CTIO, working on scalable transport networks. He participates in several EU Research and Innovation projects (lately Horizon Europe CODECO, and SNS DESIRE6G, 6GREEN, EXIGENCE, and UNITY-6G). He is an active contributor to different SDOs, such as IETF, O-RAN, ETSI, etc.