Energy Consumption of Photo Sharing in Online Social Networks

Online social networks (OSNs) with their huge number of active users consume significant amount energy both in the data centers and in the transport network. Existing studies focus mainly on the energy consumption in the data centers and do not take into account the energy consumption during the transport of data between end-users and data centers. To indicate the amount of the neglected energy, this paper provides a comprehensive framework and a set of measurements for understanding the energy consumption of cloud applications such as photo sharing in social networks. A new energy model is developed to estimate the energy consumption of cloud applications and applied to sharing photos on Facebook, as an example. Our results indicate that the energy consumption involved in the network and end-user devices for photo sharing is approximately equal to 60% of the energy consumption of all Facebook data enters. Therefore, achieving an energy-efficient cloud service requires energy efficiency improvement in the transport network and end-user devices along with the related data centers.