B. Holste, M. Bergstrom
Internet of Everything Corp., Europe,
Spain
Keywords: web, energy use, CO2-footprint, internet, programming language, energy efficiency, environmental impact
Summary:
Extended Abstract for: Energy Aware Computing for Machine-to-Machine Communications Author 1 (presenter): Mattias Bergstrom, Co-Founder of IoE Corp. Author 2: Bjoern Holste, Strategic Research, IoE Corp. Abstract: 1. The web is for content, and not in a sustainable way 2. Video streams are responsible for over 80% of the web traffic 3. Programming languages have a big impact on energy efficiency, unfor- tunately with low consideration in education, development and opera- tions 4. We deduce low-cost, high-impact strategies based on the above find- ings and available technologies and propose an energy-efficient, sustainable design pattern for growing traffic from M2M traffic and smart applications in multiple verticals. CO2e emissions from the current World-Wide- Web (WWW) contribute more to global GHG emissions than aviation and naval traffic combined. These emissions are predicted to double by 2025. Furthermore, the projected growth to 14% of global emissions in 2040 underlines the fact that the web in its current version is not sustainable. Already in 2019, with about 80%, the vast majority of WWW data flow is generated by video streams. 27%-points of this traffic can be attributed to pornography and compares roughly to the yearly CO2 emissions of Belgium. geographic distribution is strongly tilted towards developed countries, with an average American consuming 140GB per month vs. an average Indian’s consumption of 2GB in 2018. The energy footprint of web usage with regards to GHG emissions was already a topic of public discussion in the late 2000s, when a white-collar worker’s annual email footprint was compared to driving 200 miles in a car. But nothing much has happened since to reduce the relative GHG emissions of digital services. On the contrary, the big providers have since significantly grown their user-base and subsequently run larger and more energy intensive databases and applications. We analyze the sources of GHG emissions in current web technology and relate to the expected explosion in data traffic from smart applications in driving, housing, cities, space, industrial automation and other IoT domains. This is then related to cybersecurity needs and existing attack-vectors in today’s web architecture. A possible solution for sustainable cloudless computing is presented and can be demonstrated during the presentation.