Call for Papers

Fifth International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Networking (GreenNet 2026)

Energy efficiency and sustainability are becoming increasingly important in information and communication technology. A key challenge is balancing availability, resilience, programmability, and energy efficiency in networks and services, which requires reliable monitoring, metrics, and benchmarking based on well-defined KPIs. The GreenNet Workshop focuses on emerging challenges and concepts for sustainable networked services, including sustainability across all network layers in light of growing AI/ML use, new access technologies, edge computing, and increasing demand for distributed services, intelligence, computation and data transport.
Authors are invited to submit original contributions of up to 7 pages in IEEE 2-column format (written in English). Only original papers not published or submitted for publication elsewhere will be considered for the workshop.
See https://netsoft2026.ieee-netsoft.org/  which includes author and submission guidelines.

Important Dates

Workshop paper submission:  March 30, 2026

Workshop paper notification of acceptance: April 27, 2026

Camera-ready submission:  May 4, 2026

Workshop date: Friday, July 3, 2026

Topics of Interest

1. Models, Simulations, Measurements of Energy Efficient and Sustainable Solutions

• Modeling, simulation, measurement for performance, power, and sustainability assessment

• Holistic views across the full stack (from access to data center)

• Digital twins for improving energy consumption and efficiency

• Reliable, resilient, and sustainable networks

2. Network and Device Management

• Network and device management and control mechanisms

• APIs for power management interfaces

• Scheduling, timing, and orchestration of sleep modes in different network parts

• Decentralized energy management 

• Power-aware network slicing and orchestration

• Standardization efforts (metrics, KPIs, lifecycle, carbon considerations)

3.  Energy Efficiency and Sustainability Optimization

• Optimization of energy, performance, resilience, and sustainability

• Architectural solutions toward sustainable networks

• Software-driven energy reduction, self-x, zero-touch, network automatization

• Role of edge in sustainable infrastructure: optimized placement of resources

• Energy efficiency of web3 decentralized network

4. Sustainable Access and Communication Technologies

• Energy efficiency in 5G, 6G, and beyond 

• Sustainability oriented wireless and wired access network improvements

• Energy-efficient RANs and O-RAN, including effects of non-terrestrial networks

• Multi-technology access and multipath support (ATSS)

• Heterogeneous cell coverage (macro, micro, pico, femto)

• Energy-saving Internet protocols

• Delay-tolerant networking

• Distributed processing (cloud, edge, fog, serverless); efficiency in data centers

• Sustainable sensor and industrial automation networks

• Use of renewable energy/energy harvesting in network infrastructure and devices

• Carbon footprint reduction through lifecycle assessment of devices

• Lightweight IoT protocols and green sensing

5. AI/ML for Energy Efficiency

• AI/ML for network management and optimization of energy consumption

• AI/ML in slicing, fog/cloud/MEC, virtualization, automation, and adaptation

• Energy consumption reduction of AI/ML and LLM training, inference, and data center operations

• Evaluation of energy requirements of AI/ML algorithms

• AI-RAN Orchestration for performance and energy trade-offs

Previous Editions

• GreenNet 2022: 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 - 1 July 2022

• GreenNet 2023: 2nd International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Networking, co-located with the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2023), Rome, Italy, 28 May - 1 June 2023 

• GreenNet 2024: 3rd International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Networking, co-located with the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2024), Denver, CO, USA, 9 - 13 June 2024 

• GreenNet 2025: 4th International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Networking, co-located with the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2025), Montreal, Canada, 8 - 12 June 2025 

Organizing Committee

• 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)

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

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

• Chiara Lombardo, University of Genoa and CNIT S2N National Lab, Italy (chiara.lombardo@unige.it)

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

• Andrea Pimpinella, University of Bergamo, Italy (andrea.pimpinella@unibg.it)