Proposed Sustainability and the Internet Proposed Research Group (sustain)

RG Name Proposed Sustainability and the Internet Proposed Research Group
Acronym sustain
State Active
Charter charter-irtf-sustain-01 Approved
Document dependencies
Additional resources Wiki
Personnel Chairs Ali Rezaki, Eve Schooler, Michael Welzl
Delegates Diego Lopez, Luis M. Contreras
Mailing list Address sustain@irtf.org
To subscribe https://mailman3.irtf.org/mailman3/lists/sustain.irtf.org/
Archive https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/sustain/
Chat Room address https://zulip.ietf.org/#narrow/stream/sustain

Charter for Research Group

The goal of the SUSTAIN RG is to contribute to the advancement of the
Internet as a fundamental part of sustainable and resilient societies and
the planet, through conceptual and evidence-based multi-disciplinary
research collaboration.

Scope

The Sustainability and the Internet Research Group (SUSTAIN RG) explores
long-term research challenges in developing and operating an
environmentally, socially and economically sustainable Internet, from a
networking perspective. It provides a venue for discussion, collaboration
and development of Internet research on sustainability with a critical view
on evidence and data, ensuring the trustworthiness of research results and
their transparent dissemination. Grounded in the practical operation of the
Internet, the RG will work to promote greater exploration of architectural
and policy implications relating to sustainability challenges of
internetworking, without going into advocacy actions. Recognizing their
interconnectedness, the SUSTAIN RG focuses on the Sustainability of the
Internet (footprint), while fostering an appreciation of the Internet for
Sustainability (handprint). The SUSTAIN RG adopts a multidisciplinary,
systems perspective with lifecycle and supply chain considerations, also
taking into account the interdependencies between different types of
networks as well as different research disciplines.

Background

The Internet is a global critical infrastructure, on which societies,
individuals and businesses depend. It is expected to play a positive role
in tackling global challenges such as climate change, decarbonization, and
environmental degradation. Yet at the same time, there is growing concern
about the negative impacts. Internet technologies are part of value chains
that are driving increased energy, materials and natural resource use, and
increasing carbon emissions. It is imperative to minimize these negative
impacts, to support global sustainability goals, as per the UN Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs).

There are numerous research challenges for a sustainable Internet and its
applications. Characterization, monitoring, management and mitigation of
the Internet environmental footprint, as well as the timely collection,
distribution and sharing of accurate measurement data and assessments are
open challenges. Additionally, there are considerable hurdles in linking
the Internet to sustainability outcomes in real-life use cases in a causal
way, due to the absence of practical methodologies and examples to do so.
The SUSTAIN RG systematically works to frame these challenges for the
benefit of the Internet community – architects, developers, operators,
users, and policy makers alike.

Research areas

The SUSTAIN RG invites contributions on topics relating to the long-term
sustainability of the Internet:

  • Characterization and reduction of the Internet footprint to ensure it is
    environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable, from a holistic
    systems perspective, working with quantitative and qualitative
    indicators, their baselines and targets, measurements and assessments,
    sharing related data, conceptual and policy frameworks, considering
    lifecycle as well as supply chain issues, and potential mitigation
    actions. Specifically: (a) Exploration of the relationship between
    sustainability and the Internet architecture to understand the
    implications and sustainability impact and trade-offs of differing
    approaches to network design; and (b) Investigation of environmental
    limits and boundaries within which the Internet and its applications
    should operate safely and the corresponding policy implications.

  • Investigation of the role of policy and regulation in the environmental,
    social and economic sustainability of the Internet, as complementary to
    technological and operational factors, for example to incentivize
    sustainability.

  • Exploration of the impacts of different strategies for managing the
    potential rebound effects (Jevon’s paradox) of Internet sustainability
    gains, including technical, policy and regulatory aspects.

  • Appraisal of new methodologies, architectures and strategies to ensure
    Internet resilience in the face of climate change impacts that are
    already taking place (climate change adaptation). This is a distinct
    topic from environmental footprint (climate change mitigation).

Mode of Operation

The SUSTAIN RG will solicit academic, governmental and industrial research
contributions with a multi-disciplinary outreach, to enhance the state of
the art in our exploration of the relationship between the Internet network
infrastructure and applications and sustainability from long-term
conceptual, systems and policy perspectives, prioritizing research
publications and proof-of-concept implementations, measurements, and
demonstrations, over RFC production.

The SUSTAIN RG will hold regular meetings, both co-located with IETF and
on-line, encouraging hybrid modes of attendance to reduce the environmental
impact of travel, and will organize interim meetings as needed that might
align with sustainable networking conferences, workshops and other events.
It will coordinate with other IRTF RGs, like GAIA, HRPC, NMRG and DINRG,
with IETF WGs like GREEN, TVR, OPSWG, and the IAB E-impact program, as
well as with the Internet Society, and the sustainability efforts of other
SDOs, industrial consortia, and research organizations. Close coordination
with the IETF and IAB is expected to scope their differing work programs
and ensure that new work is appropriately sited.

The group will organize awareness-raising activities, such as invited talks
from sustainability experts, including from systems, environmental, social
and economic sciences and practitioners that work on sustainability target
setting, policy, assessments and strategy, to clarify the linkages. It will
organize and promote a special session on sustainability at the ACM/IRTF
Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW), working with the ANRW Program
Committee, to develop a broader publication stream for research in this
space.

The group may publish RFCs to transfer research results and feedback to the
IETF community but will defer to the IETF for technology standardization.
The aim of the RFC series output from SUSTAIN RG is to take stock of
state-of-the-art research results, highlight areas where further work is
needed, and identify policy concerns and strategy opportunities with the
broader Internet community. While the SUSTAIN RG may conduct research into
new metrics and protocol mechanisms, it is expected that these will be
described in research papers, and the development of such technologies
to the point of RFC publication will normally occur in the IETF.