Project Description

Project Description

The concept of the CONVINcE project grew out of two observations. That the Internet’s carbon footprint would exceed that of air travel by a factor of two by 2020 and that Internet traffic is driven by video. Furthermore, should people not be convinced of the necessity to reduce carbon dioxide emission, they will listen to the economic aspect of the problem: The price of electricity will increase in the coming years, even if the increasing rate is lower than foreseen a few years ago.

CONVINcE addresses the challenge of reducing the power consumption in IP-based video networks with an end-to-end approach, from the headend where contents are encoded and streamed to the terminals where they are consumed, embracing the Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and the core and access networks.

Partners’ efforts concentrated on architectures, hardware and software design, protocols and basic technologies in the devices. In parallel to these activities, the project ran transversal activities on “Software best practices & Eco-design” and “Power & QoE measurements”. The project also considered the use of new technologies in the form of Software Defined Networking (SDN) associated with Network Function Virtualization (NFV).

Project’s results are visible through demonstrators targeting tests which conclusions are made public in order to disseminate the best practices in the domain. The project also pushed its results to standardization bodies (W3C, IETF, 3GPP and MPEG). The business impact of the project is quite high: sixteen new products emerged from the work done by CONVINcE partners. Fifteen to one hundred of existing products benefit from the results of the project, most of them been mobile terminals.  Patents were filed by partners during the course of the project.