Data center energy consumption only 9%, wifi is the culprit

Some researchers from Australia found through research that in the overall environment of cloud computing, data center energy consumption accounted for only nine percent.

The report, titled "The Power of Wireless Cloud," was published by Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs and the University of Melbourne. The report notes that wireless access network technology accounts for 90% of cloud computing energy consumption, which is 10 times the data center consumption. The biggest threat to the sustainability of cloud computing services is the wireless access network rather than data center.

This is because more and more people access cloud services over wireless networks, which are inherently less energy efficient and do not contribute to the cloud resources they consume.

The report points out that the ultimate link between the network itself, and especially the telecommunications infrastructure and consumer devices, is a giant of energy consumption across the cloud.

The total energy consumption of the wireless connectivity cloud is projected to reach 30 tons of CO2 between 32 and 43 TWh by 2015, roughly equivalent to the carbon emissions of 4.9 million cars.

Illustration of the components of the energy consumption of cloud ecosystems in 2012 and 2015

Carbon emissions are based on traffic from 2.2 bytes per month to 4.3 billion words per month in 2015. The number of users is determined by companies such as ABI Research, Infonetics and Traffic Volume Forecast based on Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Communications and Ericsson data projections.