Toward Energy-Efficient Content Dissemination

A major role of today's Internet is to provide efficient content dissemination among users, such as distributing multimedia content and sharing user generated data. To meet the ever increasing demands, the Internet has been rapidly growing, and it now includes a web of tens of millions of networked devices ranging from content servers to core and edge routers to home gateways. Due to the sheer numbers, however, it is reported that these devices, such as those used for content delivery, consume a considerable amount of energy. While optimizing the energy efficiency of data centers is well studied in the literature, understanding the energy efficiency of various content dissemination strategies has received comparatively little attention thus far. In this article we review existing content dissemination architectures and survey the energy efficiency of various network devices used for content delivery. The energy efficiency comparison using simple trace-based simulations reveals that a change from a host-oriented to a content-centric networking model can substantially improve energy efficiency of content dissemination. Our preliminary results are encouraging and will stimulate further research in this direction.