MoN17: Seventeenth Mathematics of Networks meeting

Nishanth Sastry (KCL) – Consume local: Towards carbon-free content delivery

P2P sharing amongst consumers has been proposed as a way to decrease load on Content Delivery Networks. This work develops an analytical model that shows an additional benefit of sharing content locally: Selecting close by peers to share content from leads to shorter paths compared to traditional CDNs, decreasing the overall carbon footprint of the system. Using data from a month-long trace of over 3 million monthly users in London accessing TV shows online, we show that local sharing can result in a decrease of 24-48% in the system-wide carbon footprint of online video streaming, despite various obstacle factors that can restrict swarm sizes. We confirm the robustness of the savings by using realistic energy parameters drawn from two widely used settings. We also show that if the energy savings of the CDN servers are transferred as carbon credits to the end users, over 70% of users can become carbon positive, i.e., are able to support their content consumption without incurring any carbon footprint, and are able to offset their other carbon consumption. We suggest carbon credit transfers from CDNs to end users as a novel way to incentivise participation in peer-assisted content delivery.

Bio: Nishanth Sastry is a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London, UK. Previously, he spent over six years in the Industry (Cisco Systems, India and IBM Software Group, USA) and Industrial Research Labs (IBM TJ Watson Research Center). His honours include a Best Paper Award at SIGCOMM Mobile Edge Computing in 2017, a Best Paper Honorable Mention at WWW 2018, a Best Student Paper Award at the Computer Society of India Annual Convention, a Yunus Innovation Challenge Award at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology IDEAS Competition, a Benefactor’s Scholarship from St. John’s College, Cambridge, a Best Undergraduate Project Award from RV College of Engineering, a Cisco Achievement Program Award and several awards from IBM. He has been granted nine patents in the USA for work done at IBM. Nishanth is a frequent keynote speaker and he has been interviewed or his past work has been covered in print media outlets such as the Times, New York Times, New Scientist and Nature, as well as Television media such as BBC, Al Jazeera and Sky News. He is a member of the ACM and a Senior Member of the IEEE. Return to previous page

Contact: Keith Briggs () or Richard G. Clegg (richard@richardclegg.org)