Evaluating the energy efficiency of modern VoIP applications

With consistently increasing cost of energy and the increasing attention for reducing carbon, the need of less energy consumption solutions are inevitable. The reduction of Carbon footprint in the communication platforms has been identified as one of the main considerations in the future communication systems. This is due to the increasing participation by governments, lawmakers and regulators to encourage organisations and general public to use Carbon neutral or less Carbon consumption products. Research on energy efficient applications for mobile and stationary computer systems has been quite limited so far and only recently has started to be under focus.

The current research paper focuses on developing a less energy consuming voice, video and text communication platform to reduce the overall carbon footprint in organisational level. The first step was to develop a VoIP application (Green Talk) from scratch and this would offer users all the basic communication features (text, audio, video) like other well known such as "Skype" and "Google Talk" offer. The developed application goes through a number of tests in an attempt to calculate its power consumption during text, voice and video communications. During the experiments, a specific procedure was followed in an attempt to ensure that the most accurate results would be gathered. A software tool, Joulemeter, is used to estimate the computer's power use but also the power impact of a specific application. Once the results for "Green Talk" are complete the end product is evaluated against publicly available communication platforms such as “Skype” and “Google Talk” to validate the energy consumption and carbon usage. Based on the gathered results, when "Green Talk" is configured to provide the same quality of audio and video communications as the other two applications, it's power consumption proves to be significantly lower. The difference might seem to be insignificant for a single computer but if this is scaled up to the million users of "Skype" and "Google Talk" worldwide, the energy savings and the smaller carbon footprint of "Green Talk" are by no means negligible.