Evaluating Energy Consumption of Internet Services

Abstract

SUMMARY This paper summarizes recent reports on the internet’s energy consumption and the internet’s benefits on climate actions. It discusses energy-e ffi ciency and the need for a common standard for evaluating the climate impact of future communication technologies and suggests a model that can be adapted to di ff erent internet applications such as streaming, on-line reading and downloading. The two main approaches today are based on how much data is transmitted or how much time the data is under way. The paper concludes that there is a need for a standardized method to estimate energy consumption and CO 2 emission related to internet services. This standard should include a method for energy-optimizing future networks, where every Wh will be scrutinized.