Toward a Roadmap for Sustainable Networking

Abstract

As digital infrastructure continues to expand, improving the sustainability of networking has become an increasingly pressing challenge. While hardware efficiency gains and renewable energy adoption have reduced operational emissions, fundamental challenges persist: optimizing energy consumption, ensuring scalability of network infrastructure, and achieving carbon transparency, i.e., making the carbon intensity of network paths and devices visible and actionable to operators and users. This paper examines key debates in sustainable networking, including the limitations of current carbon-aware approaches, the inefficiencies of overprovisioning, and the challenges of integrating energy-proportional hardware. We then highlight the need for energy-proportional hardware, optimized traffic management, and carbon-aware routing as essential steps toward reducing both operational and embodied emissions. By outlining a research roadmap and proposing practical strategies, we aim to promote a dialog for moving toward a more energy-efficient and environmentally responsible networking ecosystem.

People

Dr. Romain Jacob

Senior Scientist

BibTex

@article{kwon2026toward,
  author    = {Kwon, Jonghoon and Jacob, Romain and Perrig, Adrian and Welzl, Michael},
  title     = {{Toward a Roadmap for Sustainable Networking}},
  booktitle = {Journal of the ACM},
  year      = 2026,
  month     = sep,
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}
}

Research Collection: 20.500.11850/806813