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Minutes interim-2025-green-04: Mon 14:00
minutes-interim-2025-green-04-202507071400-00

Meeting Minutes Getting Ready for Energy-Efficient Networking (green) WG
Date and time 2025-07-07 14:00
Title Minutes interim-2025-green-04: Mon 14:00
State Active
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Last updated 2025-07-07

minutes-interim-2025-green-04-202507071400-00

IETF Virtual Interim GREEN WG Session Agenda - 20250707

About GREEN

Materials, Charter, Documents

GREEN Chairs & Area Director

  • Area Director: Mahesh Jethanandani
  • WG Chairs: Diego Lopez, Robert Wilton

IETF GREEN Interim Session Times

GREEN has a single 2hr session: Mon 7th July, 14:00-16:00 UTC.

Upcoming Meetings

  1. 2 sessions at IETF 123

    • Monday 21st, session 2, 1 hour
    • Tuesday 22nd, session 4, 2 hours
  2. Further interim meetings, perhaps informal may be scheduled before
    IETF 124.


GREEN Agenda 14:00-16:00 GMT Monday


Welcome (10 mins)


Main Discussion (1 hr 40)

YANG Data Models - Next Steps (Rob Wilton) (10 mins)

Rob introduced the plans to progres with the design of a base model (see
slides)

  • We will likely have to repeat these points in Madrid, addressing the
    wider GREEN audience

Data Models Discussion (1 hr 30)

  • Discussion based on Rob's issues slides

Q3: Mow much granularity in power control?

  • Tony: It should be very very high level. We do not need a fine
    control, or describe/use all the available power savings choices
  • Different config and state.
  • Mahesh: It is good to keep things simple, but let's consider some
    degree of flexibility. Think about optical devices and their low
    power modes
  • Jan: Simplicity.

    • Can't need to know about all devices.
    • Need to keep a model different from operational complexity.
    • Need to express it in term was is requested and the limits in
      power consumption. And timing (how much it takes to return to
      the desired condition) must be taken into account.
  • Rob: Use of identities:
    https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7950.html#page-163

  • Qin : Identities help. See energy-saving-power-state identity in
    draft-cwbgp-green-common-energy-management, I think it is a good
    example
  • Diego: I believe that a limited number of controlable states (3-4
    maximum) and appropriate measuremens would be the most suitable
    strategy
  • Marisol: We have the IANA states, and we could leave devices/systems
    to choose the ones they implement
  • Rob: IANA power states are too granular to be practical or usable in
    most cases
  • Toerless:

    • Lots of nerd knobs in Linux.
    • Lots of routers range from simple to complex in terms of user
      interface.
    • Examples could be given.
  • Tony Li:

    • Want to elimate Nerd Knobs (both customers and vendors)
    • The more that we can make automatic, the better it is.
  • Toerless:

    • Seeing automation.
  • Emile: Contollers need to be informed of the capacities of the
    devices

  • Tony: The controller-centric approaches have problems scaling and
    being applied in many network service providers

    • Controllers in SP market, very much the exception.
    • Only people are other those with large programming staff.
  • Rob: Let's try to simoplify how features are made available and how
    choices are made

  • Diego:

    • We should cope with both small and large control loops.
    • Don't assume that there will only a single controller, or that
      it will be fully distributed.
    • What is relevant is how much information (and how many
      categories) are used in the control loop
    • We should not prescribe a particular deployment style
  • Gen Chen:

    • Need to understand and report device capabilities.
  • Tony:

    • Augment devices with your capabilities.
  • Diego:

    • And a limited number of generalized power states seems to be the
      only possible compromise
  • Qin: I tend to agree with Toerless, we can not fully trust device to
    do the job without mistake, device needs to expose more information
    for better debugging or troubleshooting.

  • Issue Summary:
    • Want to support both controllers and control on the device
      (i.e., distributed behaviour)
    • Want to be able to have a simple model, that can be extended.
    • Bandwidth requirements for interface.
    • Can split between simpler config and more complex state.
    • Should consider capabilities
    • Can augment, but would want guidance, and this was different in
      ANIMA.

Q8: How to control or report accuracy of the information?

  • Marisol: In POWEFF draft we did address accuracy, and we tried to
    simplify as much as possible from a practical point of view. We
    defined a accuracy factor to be defined by the vendor, similar to
    the 80+ certification for PSUs, which defines accuracy
  • Tony: TRhe best we are gonna get will be base on software estimates,
    very close to best effort
  • Jan: We could go for some kind of accuracy reporting standard, like
    the bronze-silver-gold rings in resistors
  • Tony: Prefer quantitive rather than qualitive.
  • Diego: Marisol, would that be somehow related to the accuracy report
    Jan proposed?
  • Marisol: Yes, Diego! this is aligned with the comment from Jan ...
    check on https://www.clearesult.com/80plus/ most vendors will
    register PSU under the 80+ cert.
  • Toerless:

    • Had this problem for a long time, e.g., MIBs.
    • We've survived with traffic stats.
    • Perhaps a capability model to express the accuracy.
  • Toerless:

    • Need to list all possible lists of inaccuracies
  • Tony:

    • Jan's idea of reporting accuracy is a reasonable approach.
  • Jan:

    • Classes allow different granularity.
  • Toerless:

    • Sampling intervals.
  • Tony:

    • Exposing the sampling rate would be okay.
  • Qin: In addition to Jan's proposal, the same approach as hardware
    yang can be followed, using value-precision to represents a sensor
    value precision range

  • Marisol: I wanted to mention related to sustainability, vendors
    defined product carbon footprint based on the lifecycle status:
    manufacturing, transport, usage and end of life. Aligning with this,
    the analysts are based on big ranges of accuracy... we somehow
    should think about how to link some of this terms

Q9: What time intervals is the data being reported over?

  • Toerless: A possible approach could be adding timestamps to the
    measurements
  • Rob: YANG Push also provides some timing metadata that could be used
    for this purpose
  • Tony: Instantaneous values would be much easier to implement
  • The unit issue: We can overflow counters, especially if we use
    something like milliWatts

    • Toerless: The worst case would be using milliWatts-hours to
      meter energy consumption
  • Summary:

    • Report instanstaneous power
    • Perhaps also report total power consumed since device was last
      cleared.
    • Perhaps report over over a longer time interval.
    • Do need ability to report accuracy of the information (e.g.,
      perhaps +/- 5%.)
    • Tony Li, wanted Watts not milliWatts. Could use 2 counters.

Closing (10 mins)