Between the User and the Cloud: Assessing the Energy Footprint of the Access Network Devices

The energy and overall environmental footprint of the internet and the increasing data traffic is of public and political concern. Such quantification would require substantial international measurement campaigns and in effect the collection of large amounts of data that are typically considered business secrets. In this paper the authors introduce an approach for modeling the energy and environmental footprint of the internet on the example of radio access networks. The concept derives from process-flow modeling.