Assessing the energy consumption or carbon footprint of internet services is usually carried out through energy or carbon intensity figures (in Wh or gCO2e per GB). In this talk, I will first review the reasons why such approaches are likely to lead to misunderstandings and potentially to erroneous conclusions. To overcome those shortcomings, we introduce a new methodology to assess the impact of a given internet usage on the network infrastructure. The use case in this talk will video on demand. The core of the method is a simplified network, which is automatically scaled according to peak usage needs. This modeling is used to compare the power consumption of this infrastructure under different scenarios, ranging from a sober baseline to a generalized use of high bitrate videos.
Aurélie Bugeau is a full professor in computer science at University of Bordeaux and a member of the French National Institute (IUF) Her primary research area is image processing and analysis. Since few years, she also studies environmental impacts of ICT.
