Reducing Carbon Footprint of Internet Users' Traffic using New Internet Technologies

What is it about?

With the emergence of new Internet technologies like SCION, end users can take control of the path their packets take to reach their destination. This is in contrast to the legacy Internet where users only know the address of the destination, which they put in their packets, and Internet routers decide where to send the packets. To make an analogy, it is like you write which route you want your postal packages go through (new technology) instead of just writing the destination on them and trust the post office about the delivery route (current Internet). Using this new technology, we can provide users with information about how much CO2 each path would produce as the result of electricity consumed by the routers on the route, and let them decide which route they want to send their traffic. Thus, they can decide to reduce their carbon footprint by selecting greener paths, i.e., the ones that are more energy efficient, or powered by renewable energy resources. This is just like the Google maps showing you which routes to the destination are more environment friendly. We have designed and implemented our method based on the SCION path-aware Internet and showed that 80 percent of users can reduce their Internet carbon footprint, halving it for half of them.

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Photo by Anthony Bressy on Unsplash

Photo by Anthony Bressy on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This work shows the remarkable potential of new Internet technologies for making the Internet more environment friendly. Furthermore, it allows end users and companies to reduce the carbon footprint of their Internet usage and save on carbon taxes.

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