Comparative Energy Consumption Analysis of Video Streaming at Different Speeds on Different Internet Browsers

The use of Internet has boomed in the last decade, nowadays almost everyone owns a smart device that is connected to the Internet. This increase in the online network usage has led to a rise in energy consumption in the ICT sector. Both the end/edge devices and the backbone Internet infrastructure (switches, routers, servers, etc.) need to be constantly powered with a considerable amount of energy. Though, the production of electrical energy proves to be still a very harmful process for the environment, greenhouse gas emissions are discharged in the atmosphere at astonishingly high rates. A reduction in the energy consumption is what we are striving to achieve in the present. Therefore, it is essential to keep track of how much energy ICT applications and programmes use in order to foresee future modelling and device research possibilities. Video steaming started to represent a high percentage in the Internet usage in the last years. This is due to the rise in popularity of consuming digital entertainment over the traditional broadcasting. This research work tries to get some insights into the power consumption of different Internet browsers while videos are streamed at different speeds. To compare, a typical user environment was developed in order to analyse the proposed scenarios.