Energy trade-offs among content delivery architectures

It is envogue to consider how to incorporate various home devices such as set-top boxes into content delivery architectures using the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) paradigm. The hope is to enhance the efficiency of content delivery, e.g., in terms of reliability, availability, throughput, or to reduce the cost of the content delivery platform or to improve the end user experience. While it is easy to point out the benefit of such proposals they usually do not consider the implications with regards to the energy costs. In this paper we explore the energy trade-offs of such P2P architectures, data center architectures, and content distribution networks (CDNs) by building upon an energy consumption model of the transport network and datacenters developed in the context of Internet TV (IPTV). Our results show that a CDN within an ISP is able to minimize the overall power consumption. While a P2P architecture may reduce the power consumption of the service provider it increases the overall energy consumption.