The Energy Intensity of the Internet: Edge and Core Networks

Environmental assessments of digital services seeking to take into account the Internet’s energy footprint typically require models of the energy intensity of the Internet. Existing models have arrived at conflicting results. This has lead to increased uncertainty and reduced comparability of assessment results. We present a bottom-up model for the energy intensity of the Internet that draws from the current state of knowledge in the field and is specifically directed towards assessments of digital services. We present the numeric results and explain the application of the model in practice. Complementing the previous chapter that presented a generic approach and results for access networks and customer premise equipment, we present a model to assess the energy intensity of the core networks, yielding the result of 0.052kWh/GB. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09228-7_9 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-110004 Accepted Version Originally published at: Schien, Daniel; Coroama, Vlad C; Hilty, Lorenz; Preist, Chris (2015). The energy intensity of the internet: edge and core networks. In: Hilty, Lorenz; Aebischer, Bernard. ICT Innovations for Sustainability. Cham: Springer, 157-170. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09228-7_9 This Accepted Author Manuscript is copyrighted by Springer. The final publication will be available via http://link.springer.com/bookseries/11156 by end of August 2014. Suggested citation: Schien, D., Coroama, V.C., Hilty, L.M., Preist, C.: The Energy Intensity of the Internet: Edge and Core Networks. In: Hilty, L.M., Aebischer, B. (eds.) ICT Innovations for Sustainability. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 310. Springer International Publishing (2014, in press) The Energy Intensity of the Internet: Edge and Core Networks Daniel Schien, Vlad C. Coroama, Lorenz M. Hilty, and Chris Preist, 1 University of Bristol, Department of Computer Science, Bristol, UK {schien, cpreist}@cs.bris.ac.uk 2 Measure-IT Research, Bucharest, Romania 3 Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Switzerland 4 Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, St. Gallen, Switzerland 5 Centre for Sustainable Communications CESC, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden Abstract. Environmental assessments of digital services seeking to take into account the Internet’s energy footprint typically require models of the energy intensity of the Internet. Existing models have arrived at conflicting results. This has lead to increased uncertainty and reduced comparability of assessment results. We present a bottom-up model for the energy intensity of the Internet that draws from the current state of knowledge in the field and is specifically directed towards assessments of digital services. We present the numeric results and explain the application of the model in practice. Complementing the previous chapter that presented a generic approach and results for access networks and customer premise equipment, we present a model to assess the energy intensity of the core networks, yielding the result of 0.052kWh/GB. Environmental assessments of digital services seeking to take into account the Internet’s energy footprint typically require models of the energy intensity of the Internet. Existing models have arrived at conflicting results. This has lead to increased uncertainty and reduced comparability of assessment results. We present a bottom-up model for the energy intensity of the Internet that draws from the current state of knowledge in the field and is specifically directed towards assessments of digital services. We present the numeric results and explain the application of the model in practice. Complementing the previous chapter that presented a generic approach and results for access networks and customer premise equipment, we present a model to assess the energy intensity of the core networks, yielding the result of 0.052kWh/GB.