| Internet-Draft | Sustainability Insights | September 2023 |
| Andersson, et al. | Expires 18 March 2024 | [Page] |
This document motivates the collection and aggregation of sustainability environmental related metrics. It describes the motivation and requirements to collect asset centric metrics including but not limited to power consumption and energy efficiency, circular economy properties, and more general metrics useful in environmental impact analysis. It provides foundations for building an industry-wide, open-source framework for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, enabling measurement and optimization of the overall impact on the environment of networking devices, software applications, services, and solutions across the lifecycle journey.¶
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To answer questions about how sustainable equipment and operational practices are, various key performance indicators (KPIs) produced by network devices, management systems, and networking solutions are necessary. While such KPIs are abundantly produced and collected today there are quite a few issues with their usability and commonality. Without a common definition of metrics across the industry and widespread adoption, we will be left with ill-defined, potentially redundant, and proprietary metrics.¶
An aspect lacking today is the precise definitions of the collected metrics. This leads to KPIs that are not comparable to each other, as it is unknown what is included in the outcomes and what is not. It makes it challenging to sum or compare numbers from different manufacturers and organizations without investing in data normalization and a high number of assumptions.¶
To produce aggregate data, it is also important to consider how the component inputs are combined. Different vendors and operators might do this aggregation differently, yet again producing values that are hard to combine or compare when also using different units of measurement. In many cases, one might suspect the actual numbers are underestimated, since there is competitive pressure to produce small numbers to report on the environmental impact of Internet communications and applications in contrast with the benefit of using it. The aim shall not be to "produce the numbers" but to find quantitative measures, when possible, that give a fair assessment of Sustainability related metrics vs. useful work.¶
It may be tempting to define the useful work in networking equipment as simply as the number of bits that are passing through the device. For some types of equipment, that might be appropriate, but clearly a video system that is sending a video stream with better video compression is not necessarily less sustaiable just because it sends fewer bits per Joule. There are also many kinds of networking equipment where measuring the end user value in number of passed bits is obviously ridiculous, and other metrics have to be defined. Monitoring or management systems are examples of this.¶
Another important and key aspect, when referring to environmental impact metrics is what needs to be considered as part of the lifecycle. Life cycle assessment, also known as LCA, of networks and services, is defined by ISO 14040 as the compilation and evaluation of the inputs, outputs, and potential environmental impacts throughout its lifecycle.¶
LCA is based on four main phases:¶
This document is setting up the stage to identify data quality requirements, under the information and communications technology (ICT) category. Following product Lifecycle Accounting (LCA), this document focuses on using the five product lifecycle stages defined by the GHG Protocol Accounting and Reporting Standard, which is in accordance with the ISO 14040:44 standards:¶
Impact and interpretation will be briefly covered under the document's motivation and use cases sections.¶
There is reason to suspect that nebulous definitions combined with the competitive pressure might produce greenwashing. Greenwashing involves making an unsubstantiated claim to deceive consumers into believing that a vendor's product or solution is environmentally friendly or has a greater positive environmental impact than it does. This document proposes the following initiative to counter these effects.¶
As an industry, we need to cooperate and agree on a set of core KPIs that are measured, including the definition of terms, units, and measurement procedures. What is included, and what is not included.¶
Sustainability metrics require a broad diversity of data sources that need to be combined.¶
To enable the exchange of sustainability data among all interested parties, deployment considerations that are out of the scope of this document will need to include:¶
YANG data models as part of the Sustainability Telemetry Specification, which will follow this document, have been classified as follows:¶
The model definition can be implemented in different forms. We would like to propose a specific YANG model for the sustainability metrics, which intrinsically allows for a variety of collection protocols. YANG can be used independently of the transport protocol, and lends itself well to be converted into a variety of encoding formats supported by popular network configuration protocols.¶
The rest of this document is organized as follows. Section 2 establishes the terminology and abbreviations. Section 3 outlines the goals and motivation of Sustainability metrics. Section 4 discusses Use Cases that lay out the groundwork for the Sustainability Telemetry Specification, to address new business needs introduced by the Circular Economy and to avoid excessive climate change.¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
Terminology and abbreviations used in this document:¶
Hardware, software, applications, or services. An asset can be physical or virtual.¶
Marketing (intentionally or not) an asset as being green (i.e. fitting well into the circular economy) by selectively omitting less green aspects of the asset.¶
An economic paradigm in which the full lifecycle cost of resource use and emissions are included.¶
The disruption of ecological processes caused by excessive resource use or emissions.¶
Aside from the need for consistency on metrics to be considered as part of the ICT sector, to reduce environmental impact and increase benefit; this document and future work related, aim to support the Digital Product Passport initiative under the European Union's (EU's) Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP) and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). There is not much time for businesses to prepare and for IETF work to influence this development.¶
The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is key to the EU’s transition to a circular economy and will provide information about assets' environmental sustainability. It aims to improve traceability and transparency along the entire value chain of an asset and to improve the management and sharing of product-related data which are critical to ensuring their sustainable use, prolonged life, and circularity.¶
There is a need to:¶
In the case of upgrading, repairing, repurposing, or remanufacturing a product, it should be clear the responsibility to update the information is transferred to the installer, repairer, or remanufacturer who will be putting the product into service or placing it on the EU market.¶
The three main target groups of the passport are:¶
The DPP will help business planners and consumers make informed choices when purchasing assets, and should also help local and public authorities to better perform checks and controls.¶
To enable the exchange of sustainability data among all interested parties at each step of the value supply chain, a technical sustainability framework for how this data is queried, transported, and visualized will be required.¶
To drive quick adoption, we propose to build an open-source aggregation framework for sustainability data. This framework should be seen as a reference architecture for a sustainability monitoring mechanism. The reference implementation will be based on the IETF standards mentioned before. The architecture would supply a few base components, but otherwise, allow vendors or standards bodies to plugin their applications that fit in the general framework. One example of such an application that we would like to propose is a model to calculate the Total Sustainability Cost of Ownership (TSCO) for network solutions based on the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Materiality Matrix. This matrix model is open to adding any implementation that takes into consideration Sustainability objectives at a point in time, but it also evolves with the needs of the business and the stakeholders. The initial scope proposes to investigate the top four most important ESG Materiality issues as a base to grow the TCO to a TSCO that matches the Company's priorities and issues.¶
Items that are not in the scope of this edition of this document, but could be addressed in future revisions, include:¶
An organization is running a large and complex network with many types of devices. By looking at the utility bills, it is clear that the organization is consuming rather more energy per transported bit than many other organizations. Exactly which devices or network functions are at the root of the situation is unclear, however.¶
The product LCA in this scenario applies to the stage of "Use".¶
By providing near-real-time data that is broken down at least to an individual hardware device, and ideally considerably deeper than that, it will be possible to attribute energy and environmental footprint costs to different device types, service types, and individual customers.¶
If one customer is altering its behavior or load on the network, a monitoring application could detect this quickly. It would also be possible to try several implementations or configurations for a given service and get quick feedback on the operations cost of that change.¶
An organization is running a network with a variety of managed services and applications. Some of the devices are getting old, and have lower energy efficiency than more modern devices. Replacing old devices with new ones might improve efficiency, but has an economical as well as environmental cost. Without specific performance data, it is difficult to make informed decisions about upgrades.¶
The product LCA stage applies to "Use".¶
By providing KPIs for reading sustainability parameters that pertain to actual usage, rather than numbers from data sheets, the accuracy of upgrade decisions is enhanced. Such data can make the case for an upgrade very clear and easy to make, or it may show that it's not a good idea at this time. In both cases improving the sustainability of the operations.¶
Recycling and reuse are major drivers of the circular economy. Companies must put high efforts in this direction and transparency. This is a qualitative KPI, passed if percentages of recycled and reused goods given the manufacturing options, as well as reports listing how many units have been recycled.¶
The product LCA applies to the stage of "Material Acquisition / Processing".¶
The trend seems to be to report on the percentage of recycled user devices and the eco-design and refurbishment efforts. Sustainability Insights can enable the data sources to report comprehensive reporting of recycling efforts.¶
An organization is running a network with a variety of managed services and applications. The network and application performance is continuously monitored, and there are even some automatic remediation actions that may trigger when certain conditions are detected.¶
In this scenario, the product LCA applies to the stage of "Use".¶
By providing KPIs for sustainability parameters such as power consumption and power efficiency, the monitoring system can access relevant data and perform actions that reduce the power consumption or sustainability footprint of the delivered services.¶
For example, some overly redundant links or systems may be powered off at night, or enter into a low-power mode. A highly available application may be configured to take more load in the data center with a lower price of energy, lower outside temperatures, or an environmentally superior energy mix.¶
IT solutions are currently analyzed from two main perspectives: technological and economical. When looking at environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) impact topics, sustainability metrics in the context of digital transformation, deliver insights into opportunities and risks that emerge from a rapidly growing stakeholder demand for sustainable, digitally advanced products and services.¶
The product LCA applies to all stages under the product LCA.¶
From an application point of view, this use case proposes to include Sustainability factors in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculation, where there is a need to add Environmental, Social, and Governmental Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to the analysis. However, adding Sustainability metrics comes with challenges and trades-off. Future work considers a model to calculate the Total Sustainability Cost of Ownership (TSCO) for network solutions based on the ESG Materiality Matrix. This model is open to adding any implementation that takes into consideration Sustainability objectives at a point in time, but it also evolves with the needs of the business and the stakeholders. The initial scope proposes to investigate the top four most important ESG Materiality issues as a base to grow the TCO to a TSCO that matches the Company's priorities and issues.¶
Future work might include use cases that will cover "Manufacturing", "Transport" and "End of Life" examples.¶
This section proposes a reference architecture for Sustainability Insights framework.¶
+-----------------+ +----------------+
| PROCESSOR | | USER INTERFACE |
| Recommendation |-------| Dashboard |
| Engine | | |
+-----------------+ +----------------+
| +--------------+ |
+-----------+------| Data Center |-+
| +--------------+
| |
| +--------------+----------------+--------------+
| | | | |
| +-------------+ +------------+ +-----------+ +----------+
| | Data Format | | AGGREGATOR | |AGGREGATOR | |AGGREGATOR|
| | Converter | | Servers | | Network | | Compute |
| +-------------+ +------------+ +-----------+ +----------+
| | COLLECTORS│ | |
+-------+ +-----------+ +---------+ +---------+ +---------+ | +--------------+
| METER |------|COLLECTOR | |Server 1 | | Router | | Compute | | |PROCESSOR |
| Bill | |Cooling | +---------+ +---------+ +---------+ x |Add life-cycle|
+-------+ +-----------+ +---------+ +------------+ | | cost (CO2eq) |
|Server N | |OpenConfigFW| | +--------------+
+---------+ +------------+
¶
Sustainability Data Models defines the data schemas for Sustainability Insights data. Sustainability Insights Data Models are based on YANG. YANG data models can be used independently of the transport protocols and can be converted into any encoding format supported by the network configuration protocol. YANG is protocol independent.¶
To enable the exchange of Sustainability Insights data among all interested parties, deployment considerations that are out of the scope of this document will need to include:¶
It will be important to consider where, when, and how often the data will need to be collected. As per the specification of the data, data might need to be collected from different data sources: network devices, and different databases where manufacturing information is stored and maintained. Ideally all this information can be extracted via a well-defined API. The frequency to collect the data will also vary, for instance, comparing manufacturing data with runtime data. For example, it might be a good practice to collect inventory data once per day, while “environmental” data might need to be updated hourly or even more frequently. It will also be important to consider the platform from where data might be collected, and the need to properly correlate all the information.¶
The security considerations mentioned in section 17 of [RFC7950] apply.¶
Sustainability Insights brings several security and privacy implications because of the various components and attributes of the information model. For example, each functional component can be tampered with to give manipulated data. Sustainability Insights when used alone or with other relevant data, can identify an individual, revealing Personal Identifiable Information (PII). Misconfigurations can lead to data being accessed by unauthorized entities.¶
Methods exist to secure the communication of management information. The transport entity of the functional model MUST implement methods for secure transport. This document also contains an Information model and Data-Model in which none of the objects defined are writable. If the objects are deemed sensitive in a particular environment, access to them MUST be restricted using appropriately configured security and access control rights. The information model contains several optional elements which can be enabled or disabled for the sake of privacy and security. Proper authentication and audit trail MUST be included for all the users/processes that access Sustainability Insights Telemetry Data.¶
RFC Editor Note: This section is to be removed during the final publication of the document.¶
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This document was created by meaningful contributions from Jeff Apcar, Klaus Verschure and Suresh Krishnan.¶
The authors wish to thank them and many others for their helpful comments and suggestions.¶