Project CONVINCE

Abstract

The concept of the CONVINcE project grew out of two observations. That the Internet’s carbon footprint would exceed that of air travel by a factor of two by 2020 and that Internet traffic is driven by video. The sum of all forms of IP video will be 80% to 90% of total IP traffic in 2017. Furthermore, should people not be convinced of the necessity to reduce carbon dioxide emission, they will listen to the economic aspect of the problem: The price of electricity is increasing and will still increase in the coming years.

CONVINcE will address the challenge of reducing the power consumption in IP-based video networks with an end-to-end approach, from the Head End where contents are encoded and streamed to the terminals where they are consumed, embracing of course the CDN and the core and access networks.

The partners’ efforts will concentrate on architectures, hardware and software design, protocols and basic technologies in the devices. In parallel to these activities focussed on optimizing the power consumption in each part of the system, the project will run transversal activities on “Software best practices & Eco-design” and “Power & QoE measurements”.

Project’s results will be visible through demonstrators targeting tests which conclusions will be made public in order to disseminate the best practices in the domain. It is also the intention of the project to push its results to standardization bodies.

The business impact of the project will be the further delivery of new products and services designed from the beginning with aggressive power reduction objectives.