Life cycle assessment of videoconferencing with call management servers relying on virtualization

Abstract

Abstract-Recently, data centres have been called out for their particularly high energy consumption, which already accounts for 1.5% of the total global electricity consumption and is among the world's fastest growing energy consumptions. To reduce the data centres' environmental impacts, technologies such as free cooling and sustainable power sources are used. Another newly developed strategy to improve the energy efficiency of data centres is virtualization, which makes it possible to install several operating systems, known as virtual machines (VMs), so that several tasks and users can share a single server. To evaluate the environmental advantages and burdens of this strategy, assessments tools are required. Several studies have already quantified the energetic and environmental benefits of virtualization but often only considered the use phase and CO2 improvement. This study uses life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate the environmental impacts of Internet use in videoconferencing (VC). Preliminary results show the advantages of virtualization in the manufacturing, use and endof-life phases. Indeed, when virtualization is implemented, one server can be allocated to several tasks. Therefore, the environmental burden of use and manufacturing will be allocated to the various tasks, decreasing the impact of each one.

Applications and Challenges of Life Cycle Assessment in the Context of a Green Sustainable Telco Cloud

“…This result is also observed for other environmental indicators with a similar increase in impacts. These findings are in line with previous GSTC technology assessments in other contexts [29,33,36,[40][41][42][43].…”

“…Different services share some of the ICT equipment considered in the studied systems. Therefore, allocation factors are computed to attribute the environmental impacts of the equipment to each service based on the approach proposed by Vandromme et al [36].…”

The Water Footprint of Data Centers

“…This is one among several publications dealing with the carbon emissions or renewables in relation to DCs. In particular, the literature is rich with new algorithms for optimizing workload distribution among data centres [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] and server electricity demand optimization [30,31]. Some publications have also highlighted the role of geographic location or siting in carbon emissions and energy use optimization [32][33][34].…”

Cloud-Based Machine Learning Tools for Enhanced Big Data Applications

“…By running multiple virtual machines on the same hardware, virtualization allows us to achieve a high utilization of the available hardware resources. Moreover, virtualization brings advantages in security, reliability, scalability and resource management (e.g., [9], [42], [10]). Resource management in the virtualized context can be performed by classifying the workload of the virtualized application (e.g., [50]).…”