In 2015, all United Nations Member States adopted the 2030 agenda for a sustainable future with 17 goals for sustainable development [1]. These goals form a basis of different flagship projects towards a sustainable, energy efficient, but also high-performing 6th generation mobile network (6G), e.g. [2]. Considerable actions have been and are currently undertaken toward greener networks and ICT in general (see, e.g., [3]-[7]). In this context, the general question on how future networks can reduce the carbon footprint arises at a first glance. However, also other challenges like resource consumption or environmental pollution by many low-cost end devices must be taken into consideration in future networks. Worldwide initiatives like GSMA Mobile Net Zero, UN’s Race To Zero, and the Climate Pledge are growing, grouping major telecommunication providers towards the double objective of achieving carbon neutral network infrastructures and of helping third-party sectors’ sustainability. Tackling these issues is one major task for network researchers and engineers in the current decade.

From a network service providers’ point of view, different new challenges arise. For example, intelligent and flexible approaches are required to turn certain hardware on and off based on user and network demands, currently available renewable energy, and service load. In addition to network management and service monitoring, energy management solutions are required. This leads to a more efficient usage of cloud and edge solutions with traffic offloading closer to the user on the one hand, but also task orchestration on the other hand. Furthermore, a suitable trade-off must be reached between expensive, high-power, but also resource consuming new hardware and software solutions like virtual network functions (VNFs). Lastly, the coexistence of different access technologies like cellular, Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs), WiFi, as well as satellite communications and networking must be studied to improve energy efficiency. By intelligent access traffic steering, switching, and splitting (ATSSS) and the usage of AI/ML in wired and wireless access networks, including 5G and 6G networks, the end user quality demands must be met. For these reasons, to tackle these challenges, ideas and research in a multitude of different areas are required and most innovative solutions must be further developed for a productive use in industry.

The 2nd International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Networking is the second version of the successful 1st International Workshop on Network Energy Efficiency in the Softwarization Era (GreenNet 2022), co-located with the IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2022) Milan, 27 June - 01. July 2022.

The aim of the GreenNet 2023 Workshop is to explore some of the issues that this evolution poses on finding suitable traffic and power models, as well as management and control strategies, along with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to be used for the lifecycle management and optimization of VNFs and the creation and dynamic reconfiguration of network slices, to match as closely as possible the desired balance between sustainability in terms of energy consumption and capacity performance. Furthermore, the goal is to not only consider an energy-efficient and sustainable access network but complete network, monitoring, and management solutions from data generation to data processing and further usage. These topics have received a good deal of attention in recent years. However, the organizers believe that much research work still needs to be done. Furthermore, a lively exchange of ideas between academia and industry is a key driver to foster the adaption of the ideas.

Organizing Committee:

Roberto Bruschi, University of Genoa and CNIT S2N National Lab, Italy (roberto.bruschi@unige.it)

Franco Davoli, University of Genoa and CNIT S2N National Lab, Italy (franco.davoli@unige.it)

Hesham ElBakoury, Independent Consultant, Santa Clara, CA, USA (helbakoury@gmail.com)

Timothy O'Farrell, University of Sheffield, UK (t.ofarrell@sheffield.ac.uk)

Tobias Hoßfeld, University of Würzburg, Germany (tobias.hossfeld@uni-wuerzburg.de)

Frank Loh, University of Würzburg, Germany (frank.loh@uni-wuerzburg.de)

Call for Papers:

Second International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Networking (GreenNet)

Energy efficiency and sustainability have become of paramount importance in all human activities. Regarding ICT, it has been long recognized that its impact on helping reduce the carbon footprint of other activities can be significant; then, it would be odd if the same principle would not apply to ICT itself. In particular, computing, communications and networking are relevant activities in this context, whose impact is absolutely non-negligible. The concept of Green Computing and Networking is currently gaining additional momentum with the growth in the number of networked applications in all vertical sectors, in the number of users and in the amount of traffic they generate. The pervasiveness of mobile networks in 5G and their evolution toward 6G, the spreading of edge computing and micro-data centers and the demand in computational and data transport capacity across the edge-cloud continuum are all factors that further contribute to making energy efficiency a fundamental aspect of future networks.

The goal of the GreenNet Workshop is to address emerging concepts and challenges related to energy efficiency and sustainability for networked services, by pursuing sustainability in the context of ongoing developments such as 5G and beyond, 6G, usage of AI/ML or distributed ledger solutions and with different network access technologies. To this aim, the Workshop will also address advanced traffic and power models, as well as management and control strategies, along with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), to be used for the lifecycle management and optimization of Physical and Virtual Network Functions, the creation and dynamic reconfiguration of network slices, and the balance between sustainability in terms of energy efficiency and performance. Furthermore, the goal is to not only consider an energy efficient and sustainable access network but complete network, monitoring, and management solutions from data generation to data processing and further usage. The trade-off between availability, resiliency, programmability, and energy efficiency is a key challenge. Monitoring methods and metrics for power consumption, energy efficiency, as well as sustainability are important, as well as benchmarking of solutions based on well-defined KPIs.

We solicit original papers on the following (and related)

Topics of Interest

●   Traffic modeling and prediction for performance and power representation

○  Analytical models of network power consumption

○  Accuracy and granularity of traffic prediction models and BS/MS power consumption models

●. Management and control mechanisms for the dynamic optimization of the trade-off between power, energy efficiency, sustainability and performance, availability, resilience

○  APIs for power management interfaces

○  Sleep modes in RAN/O-RAN and core networks

○  Timing and scheduling of hardware sleep modes in the access and backhaul

○  Orchestration of sleep modes

○  Decentralized energy management, e.g., using distributed ledger technologies blockchain

●   Benchmarking of solutions w.r.t. energy efficiency and sustainability based on KPIs

●   Sensor and industrial automation networks

●   Evolutionary strategies for the achievement of 6G energy-efficiency KPIs and Quality of Information improvement

●   AI/ML techniques for power and performance management in virtualized environments

●   AI/ML for slicing energy efficiency, fog/cloud MEC virtualization, self-x technologies, adaptation, automation, and zero-touch

●   Architectural solutions toward network sustainability

○  Use of renewable energy by network infrastructure devices to reduce network carbon footprint

○  Power-aware network slicing

○  Role of software in reducing network energy consumption and carbon footprint

○  Role of the edge to support energy sustainable infrastructure

●  Energy-efficiency and sustainability in all parts of networked services

○  Wired and wireless energy efficiency

○  Energy-saving Internet protocols

○  Energy efficiency and carbon neutrality in the fog/MEC/cloud continuum

○  Energy efficient internetworking of mobile backhaul/core and remote data centers

○  Energy-efficient 3D networks

●  Multi-technology solutions

○  Mutual roles in energy saving of satellite and terrestrial networks

○  Multipath support over multiple wireless technologies for access traffic steering, switching, splitting (ATSS)         

●  Coping with the end of Moore’s law

●  Role of standardization including network energy efficiency and sustainability metrics

Authors are invited to submit original contributions (written in English) in PDF format. Only original papers not published or submitted for publication elsewhere will be considered for the workshop. Only PDF files will be accepted for the review process and all manuscripts must be electronically submitted through EDAS: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=30418

Confirmed TPC members: 

Hamid Ahmadi, University of York, UK

Nirwan Ansari, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA

Gianmarco Baldini, JRC, Italy

Raffaele Bruno, CNR, Italy

Carlos Jesus Bernardos Cano, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

Luis Miguel Contreras Murillo, Telefonica, Spain

Taisir Elgorashi, University of Leeds, UK

Vasilis Frederikos, King College London, UK

Chiara Lombardo, CNIT, Italy

Reza Nakhai, King College London, UK

Loutfi Nuaymi, IMT-Atlantique, France

Jane Frances Pajo, Telenor Research, Norway

Symeon Papavassiliou, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

John Thompson, University of Edinburgh, UK

Riccardo Trivisonno, Huawei, Germany

Anastasios Zafeiropoulos, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Thomas Zinner, NTNU, Norway

Patrick Seeling, Central Michigan University, USA

Michaela Meo, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Nguyen Huu Thanh, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam

Falko Dressler, TU Berlin, Germany

Markus Fiedler, BTH Karlskrona, Sweden

Sheng Zhou, Tsinghua University, China

Alessandro E. C. Redondi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Giovanni Giambene, University of Siena, Italy

Tim Costello, BT, UK

Louise Krug, BT, UK

Maziar Nekovee, University of Sussex, UK

Fabien Heliot, Univeristy of Surrey, UK

Paolo Gemma, Huawei and ITU-T SG5, Italy

Stefano Salsano, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy

Daniel Kilper, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Ewa Niewiadomska-Szynkiewicz, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland

Simon Pietro Romano, University of Naples Federico II, Italy

Ioannis Tomkos, University of Patras, Greece

Brunilde Sansò, Polytechnique Montréal, Canada

Lijun Dong, Futurewei Technologies, USA

Michael Jarschel, TH Ingolstadt, Germany

Florian Wamser, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland