Energy efficient file distribution problem and its applications

Energy efficient networking has gained momentum in past one decade due to the Internet's ever increasing share in world's total energy consumption. It is crucial to study and reduce the energy consumption of tasks that are very heavily used in the Internet. In this paper, we focus on one such task, file distribution, and study its energy efficiency. We prove lower bounds on energy consumption for different scenarios that are relevant in today's Internet and design schemes that achieve the lower bounds when all the hosts have equal upload and equal download capacities. We evaluate our theoretical results numerically to generalized scenarios as well. We show that our schemes of file distribution can save as much as 50% energy compared to other energy efficient P2P methods proposed in the literature.