Empowering Sustainability: Energy Labeling of Digital Services Using Simulation

The energy consumption of digital services has become a concern for stakeholders committed to sustainability. Raising awareness of this consumption is essential to improve the energy efficiency of digital services. However, expressing the energy usage of digital services in an easily understandable and actionable way remains a challenge. We address this challenge by proposing a first operational energy labeling method for digital services in the computing continuum. Our approach enables stakeholders, including cloud and network providers, application developers, researchers, and end-users of digital services, to better understand and improve the energy efficiency of their applications. Focusing on video surveillance digital services, and using the enhanced iFogSim framework, we propose an energy labeling scheme, and demonstrate its merits with extensive scenario analysis and simulation. We further discuss how our approach can help reduce energy consumption and/or improve performance, all without modifying the application's functional parameters or system architecture.