[SCION] Carbon aware SCION networking

[Chris Adams]

Thanks for this  Seyadali,

It’s really helpful.

> The first one which is my Master's thesis exactly investigates what you asked in your email. We're putting CO2 emission per bit of intra-AS paths between ingress and egress interfaces of each AS hop into the PCB. The total CO2 emission per bit of the path would be the sum of these numbers for all hops on the path. A simple beaconing algorithm is also needed to select and propagate the greenest set of paths. (We cannot propagate all paths due to scalability issue, so we should propagate the greenest ones)
> 
> We are also investigating the effect of traffic shift from dirty ASes to green ASes on the behvior of  dirty ones and their willingness to become greener. A simple model is proposed for that in my thesis. We will use a more sophisticated model in the later work.
> 
> As this is not yet published, I'll send it to you as soon as it is published.
> 
> The second project which is older investigates the energy consumption of SCION ASes. We showed that SCION can save around 7 GW globally mostly by removing routing tables from routers. There is a report for that which is not official. We may publish it in the future.

Can I check with you on this figure please? Would this be 7GW, in terms of draw at a given moment, or 7 gigawatt hours over a given time period, like a year?

If it’s 7GW draw, and we’re assuming this would be an average for a year, that’s then we end up with (7 * 24 * 365) =~ 61 terawatt hours.

The IEA’s estimates for all the energy use by data transmission networks to be around 270 TWh in 2022 - so this would be like wiping 25% from that total energy demand 🤯

https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks <https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks>

Would you mind linking to that report? I hadn’t seen that figure before and I’d like to read it in more detail.


Chris