Observe to Sustain – How to Enable Beyond 5G Networks to Target Sustainability Goals

The emergence of 5G systems and beyond, along with state-of-the-art cloud and software engineering solutions, have brought to a radical shift of networking technologies with respect to the previous generations. However, the increased performance and flexibility have come at the cost of reduced sustainability, not only from an environmental standpoint but, in turn, affecting economic and societal sustainability as well. Infrastructure owners can introduce power management solutions in their datacenters, but the improvement is negligible unless tenant operating on top of the physical infrastructure are enabled and incentivized to customize their slices and their applications towards more energy efficient and carbon neutral profiles. For these reasons, the $\mathbf{6 G r e e n}$ project has designed an Observability framework for estimating the energy consumption and the carbon footprint of an entire network slice, or of edge-computing applications attached to it. This paper highlights the rationale behind the 6 Green approach and provides a high-level description of the observability framework.