First things first. Let’s understand what is meant by use cases.
Let’s say you have a new idea for an app-based service and would like to visualise how users will engage with your app. That’s exactly where use cases come into play. Use cases are like storyboards for your project; they illustrate the various scenarios in which users will engage with your system to achieve specific goals. By mapping out these interactions, you can gain valuable insights into user needs and expectations.
In the EXIGENCE project, the use cases outline specific scenarios that highlight the challenges and opportunities for the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and energy consumption across the entire ICT ecosystem, rather than merely providing services to their end-users. Each use case describes current services and explores how innovative approaches can tackle environmental issues in ways that stand apart from traditional methods. Through these use cases, we will extract requirements, functionalities, and elaborate strategies for their deployment across the system, resulting in a comprehensive overview of the process from start to finish, for future reference.
We started by identifying and describing 14 use cases, as listed in this post. This first iteration provides a baseline for our technical work in the three pillars of the project: measure, optimise and incentivise. (refer to EXIGENCE ambitions)
We have clustered the use cases into four groups: media streaming, green batch scheduling, green real time scheduling and energy efficiency services. By adopting this clustering strategy, partners not only ensured comprehensive coverage of all essential project aspects but are also guided in making informed decisions as they move forward in the project.
Here’s an overview of all our use cases clustered into the four groups:
Now that we are more familiar with what use cases are, let’s dive deeper into the EXIGENCE Use Cases.
The challenge of becoming carbon neutral within the ICT sector requires concrete actions. Thus, EXIGENCE identified 14 use cases that effectively contribute to reducing both energy consumption and CO2 emissions, consequently leading towards a greener future.
- 1. Media streaming carbon footprint transparency
- The carbon footprint of media streaming is a crucial issue in our digital age. Reducing its impact requires a comprehensive approach involving energy measurements and interoperability across network domains. This use case targets end-users of video streaming services and aims to inform them of energy usage and carbon impact during service consumption. This helps to create awareness of the environmental impact of their activities. While watching the video, the user sees actual and accrued energy consumption and carbon footprint displayed at the top of their screen.
- 2. Digital Sobriety
- Digital Sobriety highlights the need for actionable steps within the ICT sector to achieve carbon neutrality, involving a broader range of stakeholders. Current energy efficiency efforts often overlook end-users, but by including them and providing relevant information, we can increase awareness of their environmental impact and reduce rebound effects. This use case builds on the information provided by ‘Media Streaming Carbon Footprint Transparency’ use case and aims to empower users to manage their carbon footprints by combining CO2 data from the supply chain with behavioural data, offering alternatives that enhance user experience while minimising overall emissions. For example, when watching a video in high resolution on a mobile phone, the system may propose a reduction in resolution, suggesting that this would reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint by a certain percentage.
- 3. Economic Incentives for Digital Sobriety
- Engaging end-users and equipping them with the right information and incentives can guide them effectively. This approach leverages insights from the ‘Digital Sobriety’ and, to some extent, the ‘Behavioural Incentives for Digital Sobriety’ use cases, to develop and implement strategies that economically motivate users to reduce their individual carbon footprints. This would enable video streaming platforms to apply economic incentive mechanisms to reduce unnecessary energy consumption and allow end users to earn monetary benefits by adopting a greener behaviour.
- 4. Behavioural Incentive for Digital Sobriety
- Involving end-users and providing them with the appropriate information and incentives can steer them in the right direction. This approach builds on the ‘Digital Sobriety’ use case to develop and implement strategies as non-economic incentives that motivate users to reduce their carbon footprints. For example, video streaming platforms reduce energy consumption while users earn green behaviour badges to share with peers.
- 5. Watch TV over 5G
- As an environmentally conscious end-user you would like to have an overview of your energy usage and CO2 impact, also when using Wi-Fi through the 5G hotspot on your phone. In this use case, the aim is to assist end-users, by providing measurements on CO2 emissions generated from their activity (i.e., watching TV) and thus enabling them to make informed decisions in a more sustainable direction.
- 6. Any Service Provider
- As a service provider, it is crucial to have a reliable and clear understanding of energy consumption and CO2 emissions across the entire value chain. A service provider is a very generic role that delivers its services in several end-to-end chains, each potentially involving many other service providers. The service provider needs information about energy expenditure to be able to optimise consumption. This use case enables exchange of energy and CO2e data between service providers in a trusted and secure way, so all parties can rely on it and allow service providers to act on unwanted energy usage in their chains.
- 7. Carbon Certificates as a Service
- Energy consumption and carbon emissions have shifted from external to internalised responsibilities for consumers and service providers. This transition highlights a growing awareness that both parties play a crucial role in managing energy consumption and carbon emissions. Consumers can now track their carbon footprint and make conscious decisions that not only benefit the environment but can also lead to financial rewards. By monitoring their energy use and CO2 emissions, both parties are held accountable and can trade carbon emission certificates in the carbon market. For example, a user could opt for a service usage pattern that leads to energy saving and carbon reduction and be enabled to monetise this saving through carbon certificates awarded by the service provider. These carbon certificates can then be traded on the carbon market. This requires energy and carbon measurements to be accurate, trustable and irrefutable.
- 8. Dynamic Energy consumption Control as a Service
- Service providers and service consumers are increasingly focusing on understanding their energy consumption and corresponding carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) to actively take measures towards reducing their energy consumption and benefit by trading their CO2 emissions savings in the Carbon Market. This use case particularly addresses how a private network owner can leverage the support of a Mobile Network Operator to obtain detailed energy consumption and CO2e data.
- 9. Physical Security
- Contemporary physical security methods heavily rely on ICT systems, including components such as surveillance cameras backed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. This use case assumes cameras are connected to private 5G networks and AI video analytics occurs in the cloud. The use case will evaluate end-to-end energy consumption of the whole network aiming to optimise resources required for running AI video analytics and reduce overall energy consumption while keeping quality of service. For example, industrial site camera surveillance systems, which use multiple cameras and cloud-based analytics to detect intrusions, generate significant carbon emissions. To reduce this impact, a green energy orchestration approach is proposed. This method optimises camera settings for essential video quality and allows some cameras to enter sleep mode while others remain active, enabling the scaling down of networking and computational resources for further energy savings.
- 10. Green AI
- AI will play a crucial role in 6G systems, but its high energy and resource consumption requires sustainability measures to minimise its carbon footprint. This use case will develop an AI model distributed across various computational and energy resources, utilising new technologies and scheduling mechanisms to map tasks to nodes according to available resources and prioritise renewable energy. This approach aims to reduce CO2 emissions and create sustainable AI services in 6G Networks.
- 11. Energy profiling on network nodes
- Progressing towards a new era of AI–enabled wireless networks, AI has been recognised as a key enabler to cope with ever-changing dynamicity of the network. This use case creates energy profiles for network nodes, to achieve energy efficiency, based on context awareness. The energy profile is mapped with an efficiency index, indicating the confidence level of a certain node to execute various tasks in an energy efficient manner. The energy profile and the efficiency index of each node will be tracked over time, to extrapolate underlining energy usage patterns.
- 12. Carbon-aware pre-population of content distribution network nodes
- A content distribution network aims to enhance response times by placing content closer to end-users and minimising redundant transmission. Content originates from a server and is replicated to multiple points of presence, with replication that can be very time-consuming depending on the application. Hence, this use case aims to provide minimal or even zero CO2e impact and ICT equipment utilisation in the entire end-to-end chain is optimised. This is accomplished by scheduling the non-time-critical replication steps when excess network capacity is available and when the renewable energy ratio is high.
- 13. Green Network Orchestration on the edge
- It is imperative for network operators to handle and satisfy requests. However, with the increased demands seen within the past few years, satisfying all users equally is getting harder. In 5G and next generations, edge computing resources are expected to be scarce and expensive (depending on their distribution). This will lead to intensive resource sharing, so sudden request peaks already seen in current generations may have even more significant impacts on the delivery of services and on the overall functioning of the network itself. This use case will explore quantifying a service quality threshold in resources, energy and CO2e, which is satisfiable and allows only enough users until that value reaches (or is predicted to reach) the threshold but no lower. The rest of the users are either prevented access or (if possible) moved to other greener resources.
- 14. Green social media and email Content Download
- The rising amount of data shared and exchanged through social media and emails plus the current usage of mobile networks is increasing the challenge of achieving carbon neutrality. This use case enables download (and upload) of non-time-critical data (e.g., email attachments and photos/videos in instant messaging applications) from end-user devices via the mobile network, while minimising energy usage and carbon footprint. This is accomplished by scheduling these data transfers at a moment when the radio conditions and the energy mix at the serving base station are favourable. Service providers may offer incentives to end-users using this feature to help to reduce their energy bill.
Through these use cases, the overall approach and vision of EXIGENCE is to evaluate how patterns repeat across the entire value chain of ICT services, considering both economic factors – such as incentives, externalities, and reactions from various entities – and technological advancements like load distribution, convergence, and stability. This assessment helps us to identify opportunities to optimise energy consumption by steering the repetition of patterns towards more efficient and sustainable outcomes. Moreover, a consistent application of this approach across all layers and domains would create a seamless energy connection between edge computing, networks, and cloud services. This would not only allow us to move beyond empty green claims but also help us achieve more meaningful sustainability measures, shifting from broad organisational statistics to specific sustainability indicators for individual services.
The EXIGENCE use cases aim to engage all stakeholders of the ICT end-to-end chain, raise awareness about energy consumption and carbon emissions as an essential step to take action. We will continue working on the use cases, aiming to have a full and final version by the end of the project.
Meanwhile, we invite all stakeholders in the future energy ecosystem and in relevant projects and research to engage with us and contribute to an essential dialogue on sustainable ICT.
