Abstract
The computer network diagnostic facilities traceroute and ping are arguably some of the most used networking troubleshooting tools. Augmenting those facilities to present environmental and sustainability data and metadata would contribute to gain visibility on “green metrics” on the Internet, an objective mentioned in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) E-Impact initiative. Techniques are presented herein that support Environmental-Impact extensions (or “E-Impact” extensions for short) to both traceroute and ping. The presented extensions are backwards compatible and potentially provide per-hop (e.g., per networking topological node) power metrics, estimated greenhouse gas (GHG) emission numbers, and potentially other current or future sustainability metrics. Aspects of the presented techniques support a combination of in-packet (e.g., Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) extensions) plus out-of-band (e.g., out of band database lookup or application programming interface (API) calls from a host) methods that, together, yield the above-described new metrics. The presented techniques are useful not only in a transactional setting (e.g., a user desired to find some information so they issue a traceroute or a ping request) but they may also be run periodically in a mesh across the Internet or across an administrative domain to map out environmental-impact metrics, including energy usage, power and normalized power, and estimated GHG emissions.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Pignataro, Carlos M., "ENVIRONMENTAL-IMPACT EXTENSIONS FOR TRACEROUTE AND PING", Technical Disclosure Commons, (June 15, 2023)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/5982