Applied Networking Research Prize Talk at IETF-121

The Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) award talk will given by Sawsan El-Zahr in the upcoming IETF-121 IRTF open meeting.

The prize is for the paper "Exploring the Benefits of Carbon-Aware Routing", which appeared in ACM CoNEXT'23 and is join work with Paul Gunning (BT) and Noa Zilberman.

Talk abstract:
Carbon emissions associated with fixed networks can be significant. However, accounting for these emissions is hard, requires changes to deployed equipment, and has contentious benefits. This work sheds light on the benefits of carbon aware networks, by exploring a set of potential carbon-related metrics and their use to define link-cost in carbon-aware link-state routing algorithms. Using realistic network topologies, traffic patterns and grid carbon intensity, we identify useful metrics and limitations to carbon emissions reduction. Consequently, a new heuristic carbon-aware traffic engineering algorithm, CATE, is proposed. CATE takes advantage of carbon intensity and routers’ dynamic power consumption, combined with ports power down, to minimize carbon emissions. Our results show that there is no silver bullet to significant carbon reductions, yet there are promising directions without changes to existing routers’ hardware.

Congratulations Sawsan!