Carbon-aware path provisioning for NRENs

National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are becoming keener in providing information on the energy consumption of their equipment. However there are only few NRENs trying to use the available information to reduce power consumption and/or carbon footprint. We set out to study the impact that deploying energy-aware networking devices may have in terms of CO ₂ emissions, taking the ESnet network as use case. We defined a model that can be used to select paths that lead to a lower impact on the CO ₂ footprint of the network. We implemented a simulation of the ESnet network using our model to investigate the CO ₂ footprint under different traffic conditions. Our results suggest that NRENs such as ESnet could reduce their network's environmental impact if they would deploy energy-aware hardware combined with paths setup tailored to reduction of carbon footprint. This could be achieved by modification of the current path provisioning systems used in the NREN community.