The ongoing digitization of society at large, in conjunction with recent ICT trends, are continuously transforming economic and technical realities in the telecommunications landscape. This is resulting in an increase in power consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) production that is no longer acceptable.
The European Commission has reoriented EU policy towards making Europe carbon-neutral with high-profile programmes and related initiatives: the European Green Deal, with its central principle of Circular Economy and, most notably, the related Sustainable Products Initiative (SPI), might require reliable carbon footprint measurements not only for all products but also for all services provided in the EU. For the compartmentalised, geographically spread yet interconnected ICT, this alone would constitute a disruption. In particular, the current mobile architectures, including 5G, are authoritatively disconnected from the service realm and many infrastructural provisions. Simply put, with neither the service nor the orchestrator knowing on what device they run and what power source that device uses, it is impossible to maximise resource efficiency or minimise the carbon footprint of telco services.
Overall, it seems that a more holistic approach to carbon footprint reduction is both technically and politically justified and, in the wake of 6G, very timely. It is necessary to encompass, evaluate and optimise ICT service invocations during their end-to-end and cross-layer/cross-technology execution from the application requests, on the respective user side (e.g., terminal) down to the physical nodes along the service path, with respect to their consumed energy and the produced carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e).
Current approaches to addressing the challenges of next-generation mobile systems are insufficient or unapplicable in various contexts. The fragmented and domain-specific solutions being developed by different standardisation bodies, as well as individual optimisations for specific tenants, are unlikely to effectively reduce the systemic carbon footprint for these emerging systems.
What does EXIGENCE brings to the table
| Imaging, a world where technology serves the planet as much as it serves us!
EXIGENCE integrates measurement, optimisation and incentivisation to reduce overall energy consumption and CO2 emissions of ICT services when provided by expected future ICT ecosystems.
To achieve that, EXIGENCE has defined 3 main objectives to focus on:
Objective 1: Design and Prototype
EXIGENCE will design and build a system to assess the energy consumption and carbon footprint of ICT services (Technology Readiness Level 4). This system will evaluate the energy consumption and carbon footprint of ICT services, including those provided by different service providers and used by various tenants across different domains.
Objective 2: Innovative Solutions
EXIGENCE will explore new, effective ways to encourage service providers and users to reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint. The goal is to develop incentive-compatible mechanisms that will motivate both parties to work together towards reducing their environmental impact.
Objective 3: Transformation and Standardisation
EXIGENCE is particularly committed to leveraging its results to a wider audience through standardisation. Once EXIGENCE has gained valuable insight from the research phases, the findings will be transformed into specific requirements and solutions tailored to the most common ICT domains and systems. These solutions will be presented to relevant Standard Development Organisations to promote widespread adoption and standardisation of environmentally friendly ICT practices.
These objectives are ambitious for our 30-month journey, which started in January 2024. As of today, fetching real numbers from all the crossed domains cannot be implemented, because of lacking interfaces to access such data and lacking mechanisms for energy – or CO2e – specific accounting on a per user flow basis, not supported by any of the involved resources or domains, let alone in any agreed form (syntax, data structure, semantics). In contrast, the upcoming EU regulation would suggest making such eco-impact data available along with each ICT service.
Displaying real, measured energy consumption data for each ICT service might already serve the purpose of stakeholder motivation (e.g., service providers) to minimise energy consumption /CO2e of their respective service offering, e.g., to avoid bad reputation or to comply with potential regulation.
CO2e and energy optimisations of ICT services requires novel mechanisms, which, given the sheer number of services and the respectively involved resource elements, should be mostly autonomic, to avoid direct stakeholder involvement and, hence, to promote ICT service agility, including in the sense of optimisation.
The availability of energy and emissions data can also drive change in user behaviour, encouraging the use of more efficient technologies (5G instead of 4G, for instance) if they can see in real time how much more efficient in terms of energy consumption and CO2 generation the new technologies are.
The relevant additional optimisation cost across the value chain should be fully compensated by the overall cost saving from energy reduction at the different levels of service delivery. All involved stakeholders should benefit individually from such an approach; this can be made possible by introducing the right exchange of compensation and incentives among the stakeholders in the value chain. Moreover, to leverage the respective service user involvement and close the loop from the technological to societal measures, novel mechanisms involving economic incentives need to be considered, including a more explicit cost restructuring, or indirect returns.
To tackle these problems and meet the objectives, EXIGENCE is working on a three-pillar approach:
MEASURE
Enable “eco-data” measurements at the service level (not domain level).
OPTIMISE
Provide resource-optimised services and minimise resource footprints per domain.
INCENTIVISE
Provide data and economic incentives to respective service consumers and enable all players to redeem non-expenditures on the carbon market.
This approach will produce the following key results:
- Energy-aware ICT metering solution for ICT technology providers and consumers to assess defined service-level energy metrics, while accounting for their own energy consumption;
- Energy-aware orchestration product for ICT technology providers and consumers, integrating optimisation aspects in orchestration; and
- Incentive-compatible energy reduction mechanisms for policy-makers, ICT technology providers and consumers to enable regulators to act on the full chain of ICT service consumption.
The project will validate its approach and results in two testbeds:
- Ljubljana, Slovenia: Non-public 5G network, operating in 3.8 GHz band, edge node, far-edge nodes and 5G user devices. The 5G network can be deployed on an IaaS platform or in the cloud.
- Aveiro, Portugal: Commercial-graded stand-alone 5G mobile network with radio units in several locations and a mobility testbed with 24 fixed and a high-speed mobile node.
Getting trustworthy, available ICT measurements will have a very first, positive effect on the whole society, the users and the providers.
EXIGENCE aims to enable a per ICT service assessment of sustainability data, notably as measured, actual carbon footprint equivalent or power consumption throughout the whole involved ICT service chain. Our results will effectively limit the environmental impact of the ICT services both by enabling service provider efficiency and incentivising responsible service use