Methodologies for Assessing the Use-phase Power Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Telecommunications Network Services

In recent years, Internet traffic has grown rapidly and is expected to continue to expand significantly over the next decade. As a consequence, the resulting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of telecommunications service-supporting infrastructure have become an important issue. To assist telecom providers to gain a better understanding of the GHG emissions of the energy required for their networks and services, we develop a set of models for assessing the use-phase power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of telecom network services. Because collecting measurement information of power consumption and traffic in a telecom network is a challenging task, these models utilize different granularities of network information that is available. As the granularity of network measurement information decreases, the corresponding models will produce potentially larger estimation errors. Therefore, we examine the accuracy of these models under various network scenarios using two approaches: i) a comprehensive sensitivity analysis through simulations and ii) a case study of a real network. Both approaches show that the accuracy of the models depend on the network size, the total amount of network service (service under assessment) traffic in the network, and the amount of network nodes that are used to process the service.