Policy Paper on 6G Sustainability

I am truly excited to announce that our paper «A Framework to Incentivise Green Networks and Infrastructure in the 6G Mobile Ecosystem» was accepted for publication in Telecommunications Policy, a prestigious (Q1) multidisciplinary international journal in the field of policy, regulation and governance. The paper, which I co-authored with Sergio Illescas Cabiró and Zoraida Frías, elaborates on our previous work that we presented at the 33rd ITS European Conference in Edinburgh last year.

While the ICT sector has not historically been considered a major contributor to environmental impact, carbon emissions from its infrastructures and services are increasing rapidly, driven by the sustained growth of end-user connected devices, the proliferation of large processing data centres, and the increasing digitalisation of the economy. Emission projections vary heavily, and it is uncertain whether it will be a net contributor or an obstacle to achieving European climate neutrality and environmental goals. The paper is timely, since sustainability is meant to be one of the key pillars of future 6G networks.

Our research has been funded by the European Union’s HORIZON Europe project 6GREEN (Grant agreement ID: 101096925).

Abstract: The transition to greener energy sources and the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are essential to mitigating climate change and ensuring a sustainable future. Although the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector currently accounts for a modest share of global emissions, its contribution is expected to increase due to the rapid growth in data storage and processing demand by novel services driven by artificial intelligence (AI) in all industry verticals, enabled by ultra-reliable, low-latency, and high-capacity connectivity across the cloud-edge continuum.

Research initiatives like the EU project 6Green are developing technical capabilities to measure and expose information on GHG emissions associated with 6G network services throughout the value chain. However, such technical enablers are not sufficient to incentivise investment in sustainable infrastructures and the adoption of green services.

This paper introduces a techno-economic framework for evaluating policy mechanisms aimed at promoting greener networks and infrastructure within the 6G ecosystem. The model captures interactions among stakeholders under varying market conditions, integrates sustainability Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and operationalises the concept of decarbonisation level agreements (DLAs) as an extension of traditional wholesale service level agreements (SLAs) when allocating virtualised network functions (VNFs) to VNF infrastructure (VNFI).

We define and compare four policy options ranging from laissez-faire to regulating DLAs and considering market-driven incentives. Our results indicate that strict DLAs and subsidies can reduce emissions, but must be carefully tailored to the demand for green connectivity services and the costs borne by network operators to avoid underperformance. Progressive decarbonisation glide paths combined with monitoring network efficiency and sustainability can mitigate this risk and guide subsidized investment in new, more efficient, net-zero technologies. More holistic approaches that incorporate market-driven incentives offer an even more balanced and scalable pathway toward sustainability, and should be implemented through broader ICT sustainability plans that also cover initiatives to increase end-user awareness and address the growing environmental footprint of terminal equipment. Although the framework does not explicitly account for the energy consumption due to radio emissions, it can be readily extended to address this limitation in future work.