Reducing energy consumption - and especially carbon emissions - is one of the most important challenges facing humankind. ICT (Information and Communication Technology) is a powerful tool to reduce emissions as it offers alternatives to activities that are costly in energy: video streaming saves energy vs driving to a movie theater, for instance. Still, the carbon footprint of ICT in general and networking in particular have been growing, despite better energy efficiency per transmitted bit, due to the sheer growth in Internet usage and traffic. The information and communication technology (ICT) sector is currently estimated to create 2.7% of all global CO2 emissions and expected to continue to increase. Hence, monitoring and reducing the CO2 emissions from ICT is increasingly important. Networks are responsible for around 13% of ICT energy consumption, a third of which in turn is attributable to backbone (core) networks. As such, it is important to offer new mechanisms to reduce the energy footprint of networks. In this paper, we present a framework to include energy considerations (as a proxy for carbon footprint) into the management plane of a network. We apply this framework to optimize the network topology so as to minimize the energy spending while at the same time providing a satisfactory Quality of Experience (QoE) to the end users. We present this framework along high-level considerations, as its deployment and evaluation is left for future work.

翻译：减少能源消耗——特别是碳排放——是人类面临的最重要挑战之一。信息与通信技术（ICT）是减少排放的有力工具，因为它为高能耗活动提供了替代方案：例如，视频流媒体相比驾车前往电影院更能节省能源。然而，尽管每传输比特的能量效率有所提高，但由于互联网使用量和流量的急剧增长，ICT（尤其是网络领域）的碳足迹仍在持续扩大。目前，信息与通信技术（ICT）行业产生的二氧化碳排放量约占全球总量的2.7%，且预计将继续增长。因此，监测和减少ICT领域的CO2排放日益重要。网络约占ICT能源消耗的13%，其中三分之一又归因于骨干（核心）网络。因此，提供新机制来降低网络的能源足迹至关重要。本文提出了一种将能源考量（作为碳足迹的代理指标）纳入网络管理平面的框架。我们应用该框架优化网络拓扑，以在最小化能耗的同时，为最终用户提供满意的体验质量（QoE）。本文从高层设计思路出发对该框架进行阐述，其部署与评估则留待未来工作。