The telecommunications industry stands at a critical inflection point where sustainability is no longer an afterthought but a fundamental design principle. Existing network infrastructures, accountable for around 3.7% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, were traditionally optimised in performance metrics such as throughput and latency, not carbon efficiency. But innovative projects like the EU-funded EXIGENCE initiative are driving to make this paradigm shift towards sustainability-integrated network architecture possible. The architecture, which ranks carbon efficiency alongside other performance criteria, can help lower the industry’s environmental impact. By facilitating holistic measurement and optimisation of energy usage across value chains, these strategies set the stage for achieving net-zero networks. Integrating digital twin technology can further revolutionise this field by allowing organisations to simulate sustainability impacts before physical deployment, potentially reducing implementation-related emissions by up to 40%. This article explores how the convergence of digitainability practices and advanced network design principles will transform telecommunications infrastructure into an environmentally responsible foundation for a green digital future.
The Emergence of Digitainability Practices
The concept of digitainability represents the careful intersection of digital transformation and sustainability efforts, creating a framework where technological advancement directly supports sustainability goals. It harnesses digital transformation tools, such as enhanced connectivity and the Internet of Things (IoT), to improve the environment and support sustainable business operations. This new strategy holds out hope in the face of the Internet’s now major contribution to worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Digitainability is an integrated approach that makes digital infrastructure more sustainable. It applies digital tools to move sustainability objectives forward, providing a promising way forward.
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According to research, the concept of digitainability has evolved significantly over time, transforming from a narrow focus on preserving digital content to a broader concept of applying social, economic, and environmental stewardship principles to digital products, services, and data delivered via the Internet. This transformation indicates an increasing realisation that digital technologies need to reduce their environmental impact and actively work towards addressing sustainability issues. Companies adopting digitainability practices adhere to a set of guiding principles, such as employing clean, renewable energy, eco-designing for efficiency, having open standards, offering transparency regarding environmental effects, promoting regenerative economic models, and providing resilience in essential systems.
Recently, the U.N. Environment Programme’s CODES Action Plan, created by more than 1,000 global contributors, defines three systemic changes essential for sustainable digital transformation. These principles form a basis for rethinking network architectures with sustainability as a central design principle instead of an afterthought. As digitainability practices become more widespread, they create both the conceptual framework and practical methodologies necessary for transitioning to truly sustainable network infrastructures. This transition is not just a theoretical concept but a call to action for all of us in the telecommunications industry to contribute to developing a green digital future.
The Sustainability Challenge in Networking: A Call to Action
Traditional network infrastructures present significant sustainability challenges primarily because they were designed with performance metrics like latency, bandwidth, and reliability as guiding principles, while environmental impact remained an afterthought. This has led to a situation where existing networks consume substantial energy both directly through their hardware components and indirectly through cooling systems and supporting infrastructure. The urgency of this sustainability issue is clear, as such energy use is directly convertible into carbon emissions, especially when supplied by non-renewable means, adding to the environmental impact of the telecommunications industry. Immediate action is needed to address this issue.
The ongoing digitisation of society continuously transforms economic and technical realities in the telecommunications landscape, resulting in increased power consumption and greenhouse gas emissions that are not sustainable [2]. Despite previous generations of mobile systems (4G, 5G) efficiently reducing radio power consumption metrics measured in watts per kilobit per second, the exponential growth in data traffic has offset these efficiency gains [2]. This creates a paradoxical situation where networks become more efficient per data unit but continue to increase their absolute environmental impact due to volume growth.
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Another critical challenge arises from the dispersed nature of contemporary network architectures, in which services tend to cross various domains and include elements from separate providers [2]. This makes it very hard to accurately measure and optimise energy usage throughout the whole service delivery chain. Without end-to-end visibility and control, sustainability optimisation initiatives remain isolated and cannot tackle the systemic implications of network environmental impact, resulting in inefficiency and lost opportunity for real greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction.
Furthermore, the hardware lifecycle represents a critical but often overlooked aspect of network sustainability. Manufacturing network equipment requires substantial resources and energy, while disposal creates electronic waste with potentially harmful environmental consequences [4]. Therefore, Sustainable networking must consider the entire lifecycle of networking equipment, including design, manufacturing, deployment, operation, and disposal, to address its environmental impact [4]. This lifecycle approach reveals opportunities for improvement that might be missed when focusing solely on operational efficiency.
Re-Visioning Network Architecture for Net-Zero
Achieving net-zero emissions in network infrastructures requires fundamentally rethinking architectural principles with sustainability as a core design consideration rather than a peripheral concern. This paradigm shift involves redefining performance metrics to include carbon efficiency alongside traditional indicators like throughput and latency. Networks of the future will optimise for watts per service delivery rather than merely focusing on speed and capacity, creating a new generation of infrastructure that minimises environmental impact without compromising functionality.
Energy efficiency techniques form the cornerstone of sustainable network architecture, with modern devices saving up to 40% of electricity compared to older models [3]. Next-generation network equipment increasingly incorporates dynamic power management systems that optimise energy usage by adjusting consumption based on traffic load and automatically powering down idle components [3]. Such adaptive systems are a major improvement over older always-on architectures in that they enable networks to scale their power utilisation accordingly with real service needs.
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Flexibility and scalability become essential sustainability considerations in network design, as they lengthen the life of infrastructure and minimise the production of electronic waste. Modular designs allow components to be added or upgraded as needed, thus extending the network’s life cycle and reducing e-waste [3]. Software-defined networking (SDN) technologies further enhance sustainability by enabling centralized network control and programmatic optimisation, making it possible to adapt to changing business needs without wholesale hardware replacement [3]. This will reduce material consumption and enable continuous energy optimization through software updates.
Integrating renewable energy sources into network architecture represents another essential aspect of sustainability-first design. Network infrastructure can be designed with direct connections to renewable energy sources and intelligent load balancing that shifts computational tasks to locations with surplus, low-carbon intensive energy availability [4]. These renewable-aware architectures actively contribute to decarbonisation efforts while maintaining service quality through sophisticated green service orchestration of distributed resources. By incorporating these principles, next-generation networks can achieve sustainability without compromising the performance characteristics that modern digital services require.
Project EXIGENCE: Enabling End-to-End Optimisation
The EXIGENCE project represents a pioneering initiative addressing the fundamental challenge of measuring and optimising energy consumption across complex network environments. Its primary focus is improving the net energy consumption and carbon footprints of ICT services in next-generation mobile systems. This enables the development of critical capabilities that will facilitate truly sustainable network architectures [2]. The project’s comprehensive approach spans conceptual to practical insights, creating a foundation for industry-wide transformation toward carbon-efficient networking.
EXIGENCE’s core objectives involve creating systems reliably assessing energy consumption and carbon footprint equivalents of ICT service execution across all domains, potentially spanning different tenants [2]. This end-to-end measurement capability represents a significant advancement over traditional approaches focusing on individual components or isolated network segments. By providing visibility into the complete service delivery chain, the project enables possible optimisations of the systems rather than just its constituent parts, potentially unlocking efficiency improvements that would be hard to achieve through localised interventions.
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Moving beyond mere measurement, the project includes active optimisation mechanisms that can intelligently reconfigure network resources to minimise environmental impact. These capabilities will be particularly crucial for next-generation 6G networks, which should support exponentially growing service demands while simultaneously reducing absolute carbon emissions [2]. By integrating state-of-the-art sustainability metrics directly into network management systems, project outcomes could aid in continuous optimisation that balances service quality with environmental considerations.
To address the critical challenge of verifiability, developing mechanisms to validate carbon efficiency claims with rigorous, transparent methodologies [2] is essential. This aspect is crucial for building trust in sustainability initiatives and creating accountability for environmental performance across the telecommunications industry. By establishing standardised measurement and verification protocols, project EXIGENCE lays the groundwork for better comparing different solutions and incentivises genuine improvements rather than superficial greenwashing. This foundation of trusted measurement is precisely what the industry needs to transition from isolated sustainability initiatives to systematic transformation for net-zero targets.
Digital Twins: Understanding Potential Environmental Impact
Digital twin technology represents a transformative approach to network sustainability, offering unprecedented environmental impact prediction and optimisation capabilities before physical deployment. A digital twin could create a virtual replica of physical systems using data gathered from various sources such as sensors, devices, and other data streams, enabling real-time monitoring and simulation of network behavior [5]. This technology creates a virtual mirror that reflects changes, performance, and conditions in the physical counterpart, allowing organisations to analyse, predict, and optimise network operations without directly interfering with actual infrastructure [5].
Applying digital twins to network sustainability involves creating comprehensive virtual models that incorporate performance characteristics, energy consumption patterns, and environmental impact metrics. These sophisticated simulations with digitainability practices enable network designers to accurately predict the carbon footprint of proposed architectures and configurations, identifying potential inefficiencies before they manifest in physical deployments [6]. By testing multiple design choices in the virtual environment, organisations can identify optimal approaches that minimise environmental impact while maintaining necessary performance characteristics.
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Digital twins could also enable continuous optimisation throughout the network lifecycle by maintaining an always-current virtual representation of the physical infrastructure. As real-world conditions change, digital twin could automatically update to reflect current realities, allowing for dynamic adjustment of operational parameters to maintain optimal sustainability and business performance [5]. This capability is particularly valuable for adapting to changing energy availability from renewable sources and shifting workloads to sites with surplus cleaner energy to minimise carbon emissions while maintaining desired service quality.
Technology builds upon multiple advanced technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to capture real-time data from the physical environment and artificial intelligence to process, learn from, and make predictions based on that data [5]. This technological convergence creates powerful simulation environments that can shape complex interactions between network components and their environmental context, accounting for variable energy pricing, changing weather conditions affecting renewable energy production, and fluctuating service demands. Digital twins enable a proactive rather than reactive approach to network sustainability through these sophisticated capabilities.
Future Implications and Business Opportunities
The transition to sustainability-integrated network architecture signifies not merely an environmental necessity but also creates significant business opportunities and competitive advantages. Organisations that embrace this paradigm shift can realise substantial operational cost savings through reduced energy consumption, with energy-efficient devices saving up to 40% of electricity compared to older models [3]. These economic benefits align environmental responsibility with financial performance, creating powerful incentives for adoption beyond regulatory compliance or corporate social responsibility initiatives.
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Sustainability-integrated networks will increasingly become market differentiators as consumers, businesses, and governments emphasize environmental performance in purchasing decisions. Companies that can demonstrate verifiably lower carbon footprints for their digital services will gain preference in competitive markets, particularly among environmentally conscious customer segments [1] and see the innovative business opportunities linked with carbon markets. This market-driven transformation will accelerate as carbon pricing mechanisms become more widespread, directly translating environmental performance into financial outcomes.
Looking further ahead, truly net-zero networks will incorporate circular economy principles throughout their lifecycle, from initial design through eventual decommissioning [1]. This comprehensive approach will include using recycled and recyclable materials in manufacturing, designing for easy component recovery and reuse, and establishing effective take-back programs that minimise waste [4]. These practices will transform the telecommunications supply chain, creating new sustainable business models focused on refurbishment, remanufacturing, and materials recovery while dramatically reducing the industry’s resource consumption.
Take Away
The transformation toward net-zero network architecture represents a fundamental shift in how we design, deploy, and operate telecommunications infrastructure. By integrating sustainability as a core design principle rather than an afterthought, the industry can dramatically reduce its environmental footprint while continuing to support digital transformation across society. The convergence of digitainability practices, end-to-end measurement capabilities like those developed in project EXIGENCE, and integration of advanced simulation technologies like digital twins create the technical foundation for this essential transition.
The journey toward truly sustainable networks will require a coordinated effort across multiple domains, including hardware manufacturing, software development, operational practices, and regulatory frameworks. Organisations must adopt holistic approaches that consider the entire lifecycle of network infrastructure, from resource extraction through manufacturing, operation, and eventual recycling [4]. This comprehensive perspective identifies the most significant opportunities for environmental improvement and ensures that optimisation in one area doesn’t simply shift impacts to another.
As we move toward this sustainable future, organisations should begin implementing digitainability practices today, including adopting energy-efficient hardware, incorporating renewable energy, optimising networks for carbon efficiency, and designing for circularity [1]. These immediate steps can deliver significant environmental benefits while positioning organisations advantageously for the coming era, where sustainability performance becomes as critical as traditional network metrics. Through committed holistic action and continued innovation, the telecommunications industry can transform from a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions into a powerful enabler of a global green digital future.
References
Author
Detecon International
Dr. Shivam Gupta at Detecon International manages AI, Data Analytics, and Sustainability, leading their digitainability efforts. With over 10 years’ experience, a PhD in Geoinformatics, and over 20 publications, he advises global entities and delivers data-driven solutions. He co-developed “digitainability” and contributes to data-driven sustainability policies.
