Profiling the energy consumption of video streaming over 5G

As the streaming of video content only continues to increase, how can we make sure we’re trying to meet sustainability targets whilst using ever more digital online services? This project will look at the video streaming services pipeline and specific objectives around their carbon footprint.

The big issues

Since the Paris Agreement in 2015, when the international treaty on climate change was signed by most nation-states, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) demands have tremendously grown. The number of people with access to ICTs has been increasing and so has day-to-day usage following our lifestyles transformation.

A major part of the deployed digital online services is related to the live or on-demand exchange of video data. Popular examples are on-demand streaming of movies (e.g Netflix), live video conferencing, and collaborative online workspaces (e.g., Zoom).

Furthermore, advances in affordable mobile devices, fast wireless networks, cloud computing, etc, have facilitated consumers to create and share short clips over social media/sharing platforms. The increased volume of exchanged video data and environmental awareness are interconnected suggesting that efficiency must improve as technology usage increases, if sustainability targets are to be met.

Our response

At a high level, the video streaming pipeline consists of three basic parts: the video acquisition/processing, the networking, and the video consumption/display. Although there has been a lot of research in trying to profile and optimise the consumption on the video processing and consumption parts [5,6,7,8], there is little knowledge so far on the energy consumed over the state-of-the-art networks [9,10,11,12].

The main research question is related to the energy consumed for the peer-to-peer video streaming over 5G mobile networks and how this can inform the design of sustainable ICTs and the public awareness of green-conscious ICT usage.

The project will be split into four work packages:

WP1: Use Case and Technical Specifications Definition (Months 1-3)

WP2: Development of Experimental Hardware and Software Framework (Months 2-7)

WP3: Evaluation and Assessment (Months 5-10)

WP4: Green ICT Recommendations (Months 9-12) though publications and white papers

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Citations

[1] United Nations, Paris Agreement, https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/english_paris_agreement.pdf, 2015.

[2] Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update 2017–2022, Feb. 2019, [online] Available: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/white-paper-c11-738429.html.

[3] The Mobile Internet Phenomena Report, 2023, [online] Available: https://www.sandvine.com/.

[4] Greenpeace, Clicking Clean: A Guide to Building the Green Internet, https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-internationalstateless/2015/05/153e0823-2015clickingclean.pdf, 2015.

[5] Herglotz, C., Kränzler, M., Schober, R., and Kaup, A., Sweet Streams Are Made of This: The System Engineer’s View on Energy Efficiency in Video Communications [Feature], IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 57-77, 2023.

[6] Katsenou, A., Mao, J., and Mavromatis, I., Energy-Rate-Quality Tradeoffs of State-of-the-Art Codecs, IEEE Picture Coding Symposium (PCS), 2022.

[7] Schien, D., Shabajee, P., Yearworth, M. and Preist, C., Modeling and assessing variability in energy consumption during the use stage of online multimedia services. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 17(6), pp.800-813, 2013.

[8] Preist, C., Schien, D. and Shabajee, P., Evaluating sustainable interaction design of digital services: The case of YouTube. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 2019.

[9] Malmodin J. and Lundén D. The Energy and Carbon Footprint of the Global ICT and E&M Sectors 2010–2015. Sustainability. 2018; 10(9):3027. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10093027.

[10] Malmodin, J., The power consumption of mobile and fixed network data services—The case of streaming video and downloading large files, Proc. Electron. Goes Green (EGG), pp. 87-96, 2020.

[11] Bianco, A., Mashayekhi, R. and Meo, M., Energy consumption for data distribution in content delivery networks, IEEE Int. Conf. Commun. (ICC), pp. 1-6, May 2016.

[12] Preist, C., Schien, D., and Blevis, E., Understanding and mitigating the effects of device and cloud service design decisions on the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2016

Project Team

Angeliki Katsenou (PI)
Daniel Schein (Co-I)
Anderson Bravalheri (Co-I)