SCOPE

A combined effect of the predictable linear evolution of the production of electricity and an exponential growth of the ICT electricity demand push industrials to rethink the design of future products for ICT and verticals. A “sustainable by design” approach adopting quantitative/qualitative indicators of key values (environmental, societal and economic) on top of the key performance indicators is required. Based on the expertise of key ongoing projects: EU SNS Sustain-6G and the Danish GreenCOM project proposing 19 new optical technologies, this workshop, after a recall a methodology for a sustainable design targeting long-term impacts, will highlight how optical technologies will play a fundamental role from the access point up to the core of the network including data centers.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Digital Sustainability: A Need for Reset

HuguesF. Erreboeuf The Shift Project, France France

Brief Bio
Hugues Ferreboeuf, 64, has spent most of his professional career in the information technology sector, including 20 years in senior management positions. He has worked in various environments, such as large companies, high-growth companies and government agencies and has also been an entrepreneur, having created 3 companies. He is a graduate of École Polytechnique and Telecom ParisTech. Convinced that we are going through major changes that require decisive and rapid action, he has chosen to use his experience to advise companies and public bodies on how to transform themselves in order to deal with the current digital, energy and societal transitions. He is a partner in Virtus Management, a management consulting boutique he co-founded in 2017 and has also joined the think tank The Shift Project (*) since the end of 2016 where he has been leading the Lean ICT project (or how to make the digital transition environmentally friendly) and coordinating the production of nine reports on digitalization and sustainability. He is also a member of several advisory boards, a conference speaker in France and abroad and a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, and he took part in the Digitalization For Sustainability (D4S) European two-year research project.

Abstract
Today, the growth of our digital systems is clearly unsustainable. Direct and indirect environmental impacts (rebound effects) related to the growing use of digital are consistently underestimated. In 2019, about 3.5% of global carbon emissions were caused by the production and use of digital technology and the digital system; this figure could more than double by 2030. All the most recent academic analysis come to the conclusion that such trend is not the result of a lack of progress of energy efficiency but that, on the contrary, the business models at work within the digital sphere exploit the rebound effects caused by tremendous energy efficiency improvements brought by technological progress. The large-scale deployment of Generative AI is reinforcing this existing trend - and making it more visible - through direct and indirect effects on the digital infrastructure.

Making the digital transition an enabler of the green transition calls for a rethinking of what the digital transition should look like: a digital reset of technical architecture choices, economic models, regulatory frameworks, system design principles and even societal hierarchy of uses.

SUSTAIN-6G - A Framework for Accountable Sustainability in ICT

Christoph Schmelz Nokia, Germany Germany

Brief Bio
Christoph Schmelz is a Principal Research Lead at Nokia. He received his M.Sc. degree from Technical University of Munich in 2000 and has been working as a specialist in network and service automation for mobile networks at Siemens, NSN and Nokia since. His main focus was on concepts and architecture for self-organising networks, cognitive and intent-based management. Christoph contributed in leading positions to various EU funded projects such as SEMAFOUR and 5G-MoNArch. Since 2023 he works on introducing end-to-end and holistic sustainability concepts into the 6G ecosystem and leads the EU Horizon Europe Sustainability Lighthouse project SUSTAIN-6G since 2025.

Abstract
SUSTAIN-6G is the European lighthouse project that aims at providing a framework for holistically embedding and balancing sustainability in 6G ecosystems. The ambition is thereby to reflect all sustainability pillars - environmental, social and economic - in an end-to-end (E2E) perspective, from the device via network and services infrastructure to the (vertical) application and ecosystem. Further, the full lifecycle of assets and services is considered, calling for a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) / Key Value Indicator (KVI) interconnection to support value driven decisions and accountable alignment with global sustainability policies such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Towards this framework, SUSTAIN-6G addresses several building blocks, which will be briefly introduced in this presentation.
First, methodologies and processes to define and create a sustainability requirements space for the E2E ecosystem are developed. The needs of stakeholder from the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) ecosystem as well as vertical players are consolidated and translated into dedicated sustainability values and related KVIs. Requirements alongside the full lifecycle of assets and services are derived. For the verticals, SUSTAIN-6G focuses on three scenarios: Health, Agriculture and Energy Smart Grids.
Second, the technology solution spaces are investigated, from both the ICT and vertical sides. The focus is on advanced solutions towards improving sustainability through efficient and low-carbon, resilient, reliable and secure digital services. On the ICT side (“Sustainable 6G”) key enablers in all network domains are analysed and conceptualised. On the vertical side (“6G for Sustainability”), multiple use cases per vertical sector are investigated, with a focus on integrating relevant ICT solutions and identifying technology gaps to be addressed. Finally, a Sustainability Management Plane concept is investigated that allows the E2E monitoring and eventually configuration of the ecosystem towards overall sustainability improvements. The solution space thereby delivers KPIs relevant in the context of sustainability improvements.
Third, sustainability assessment methodologies are consolidated, whereby a focus is put on not re-inventing the wheel but integrating existing technologies, tools, processes and methodologies from relevant standards and solutions. Gaps are being analysed and closed where applicable, towards the overall aim to create a coherent and comprehensive solution for the 6G ecosystem.
Fourth, the actual evaluation of the developed solutions is addressed in particular through Proof-of-Concept (PoC) implementations of key ICT enabling technologies into selected vertical use cases. The defined assessment methodologies and tools are applied for this evaluation, with the aim to enable an iterative process of optimising the E2E effects on sustainability KVIs through improving the implementation of the ICT technologies with the vertical use cases.
A core part of the project is finally to summarise the insights of the project’s concept and evaluation work into a set of best practice recommendations for 6G design and implementation towards overall sustainability improvements, as well as roadmap proposals towards policy makers and standardisation on the necessary way forward of creating an accountable, sustainable digital future.

GreenCOM – A Green Innovation of Ecosystem of Companies, Universities and Industrial Associations

Niels Hersoug DTU, Denmark Denmark

Brief Bio
Niels Hersoug is an entrepreneurial and strategic INSEAD certified non-exec Director and Senior Executive with MBA and master’s in electrical engineering. C-level experience in global Business Unit Leadership incl. Programme & Product Management for data and telecom equipment vendors and network operators. Good Board level credentials and quantum Industry recognition. Good track record in private equity and public funding of deep tech start-up companies incl. Sparrow Quantum Aps which is a complete turn-around incl. > EUR 4.1 mil international equity investment. Ample experience in managing large national and very large EU projects.

Abstract
Increased digitalisation is key to combatting climate change, with potentially 10-60% reductions of energy consumption and CO2 emissions. The challenge to harvest these benefits is the state of digital technologies today, where hard physical limits of miniaturisation of electronic chips have been met. This in turn has brought with it a saturation of serial data speeds, and a looming explosion in overall internet energy consumption.
It is thus increasingly urgent to develop a new greener internet. So, to ensure the essential future digitalisation, the solution is to build a better critical communications infrastructure that provides higher data capacities, offers greater accessibility, supports critical functions, ensures secure online interactions, and is more energy-efficient.
To bring these features to the whole network infrastructure, GreenCOM is structured as an innovation platform forming an ecosystem of companies, universities, industrial associations. GreenCOM is developing 30 specific technologies supporting the overall network, ranging from physical chips and laser sources, over network protocols, to internet services and a green ICT certificate. 91% of the technologies are tech transfer, with industrial partners ready to implement them. GreenCOM expects to reduce the energy consumption in the sector and also create a significant increase in revenue and FTEs whilst doing so.
The speech will touch on general aspects of GreenCOM and on a few selected technologies.

The IOWN Global Forum

Lieven Levrau Nokia, France France

Brief Bio
ir. Ing. Lieven Levrau is a seasoned strategic technology leader with more than 30 years of experience in telecommunications and optical systems engineering. He holds an M.Sc. in Applied Physics (Photonics Engineering) from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and has studied avionics, blending deep scientific foundations with practical systems insight. Throughout his career, Lieven has driven innovation at the intersection of advanced optical technologies and market growth, consistently identifying emerging opportunities and shaping unique technical solutions. He has contributed to international standards and industry evolution through active engagement with IETF, ITU-T, and MEF, and is the author of multiple patents and technical publications. At Nokia, Lieven leads product strategy for optical networking, focusing on the emerging neutral host connectivity market and the integration of connectivity automation across global digital ecosystems. He also plays a leadership role within the IOWN Global Forum, where he serves as Vice-Chair of the Technical Steering Committee and Leader of the Energy Efficiency & Sustainability Task Force, championing energy-aware and sustainable network architectures. Lieven’s expertise spans optical communications, photonics-enabled networking, standards development, and cross-industry innovation — making him an ideal voice on how advanced photonics and optical technologies are transforming connectivity and systems design.

Abstract
The sustained growth in bandwidth demand, combined with increasingly stringent requirements on latency determinism, scalability, and energy efficiency, necessitates a fundamental re-examination of network architectures. In this context, the IOWN Global Forum was established as a multi-stakeholder initiative to investigate, define, and validate photonics-centric network architectures capable of addressing these emerging constraints.

This keynote provides a technical overview of the Forum’s activities, with particular emphasis on the development of the All-Photonics Network (APN) architectural framework and its role in enabling a radical shift from electronics-centric to photonics-centric infrastructures that can curb the escalating energy footprint of ICT while sustaining exponential traffic and compute growth. It will explore how energy-efficient, photonics-based network and compute architectures, aligned with the PT‑Sustain‑ICT workshop’s “sustainable by design” objectives, that can unlock orders-of-magnitude improvements in energy efficiency from access to core, including data centers.

A defining characteristic of the Forum’s work is its transversal architectural approach, which considers network behavior and optimization across multiple layers rather than focusing on a single protocol or technology layer. To support this cross-layer perspective, the Forum has developed a unified metrics reference framework, formalized in a reference metrics document, which enables consistent and comparable evaluation of performance and energy efficiency across network layers and domains.

This framework formalizes definitions, measurement principles, and normalization methods for key parameters such as latency, capacity utilization, and energy consumption across compute, packet, and optical layers. Particular emphasis is placed on energy-efficiency metrics, including mechanisms to attribute power consumption to network functions and services across layers, thereby enabling objective comparison between photonics-centric architectures and conventional packet-oriented designs.

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