While international initiatives are emerging, Dutch representation remains limited. Given the country’s strengths in both digital infrastructure and sustainable technology, there is a need for national leadership in this field. This proposal also serves as a call to action for the broader Dutch ICT community, aiming to engage not only academic researchers but also industries and network operators in translating research into real-world, scalable solutions.
We propose a series of three joint 4TU.NIRICT events to explore methodologies for measuring and reducing carbon emissions in end-to-end networked systems. The objective is to connect researchers from electrical engineering and computer science to address the technical challenges and key factors driving emissions across hardware, protocols, and system-level behavior. While hardware efficiency is essential, the carbon footprint of networked systems also depends on how they are provisioned and how they respond to dynamic workloads. In fixed networks, for example, emissions are often driven by overprovisioned infrastructure that remains powered regardless of actual usage, making effective resource management crucial. In parallel, dynamic behavior, such as congestion-triggered retransmissions, wireless inefficiencies (e.g., idle listening, handovers) or suboptimal physical layer setting (e.g., MCS, numerology) also impact energy use. These interactions are rarely studied jointly, but they are key to understanding the full environmental footprint of digital infrastructure. To address this, we will explore approaches for enabling more carbon-aware operation across layers. This includes model-driven decision support, where real-time data on traffic load and performance conditions can inform low-carbon choices, such as routing paths and offloading strategies.
- Dr. Antonia Affinito, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Twente (UT)
- Prof. Dr. Ir. Geert Heijenk, Full Professor, Department of Computer Science, UT
- Dr. Nitinder Mohan (Assistant Professor)
- Dr. Tanya Shreedhar (Postdoc), Department of Computer Science, Delft University of Technology
- Dr. Habib Mostafaei, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)
- Dr. Siamak Farshidi, Assistant Professor, Department of Information Technology Group, Wageningen University
- Dr. Joshi Kishor (Assistant Professor), Department of Electrical Engineering, TU/e
- MSc Hassani Hamid (PhD candidate), Department of Electrical Engineering, TU/e