Abstract

The energy requirements for the Internet infrastructure has become harder to manage due to the increase in connected devices and digital traffic. This research analyzes energy usage patterns throughout the Internet topology, focusing on the operational parameters of routers, access points, and data centers. Using high-precision traffic data and performance counters, the study models energy expenditures with regard to packets, data transmission, and routing. Special focus is placed on the edge and core balance, often examining the sharpened differences in energy efficiency of the edge nodes such as Home and cell base station gateways alongside core constituents of the infrastructure such as the high-capacity backbone routers and cloud data centers. To address the dynamic energy consumption across time intervals, a novel hybrid measurement approach is introduced that integrates power measurement with simulation at the network level. The employed methodology enables fine-grained consumption metrics, resulting in precise identification of high-impact network functions and their energy profiles. The study demonstrates substantial differences in energy consumption across the different tiers of services and provides evidence in support of optimized routing strategies, intelligent load balancing, and dynamic scheduling based on traffic. The conclusions of the study assist internet service providers, data center operators and network planners to manage their Internet ecosystems to lower the carbon footprint and improve the energy efficiency of the systems. This work helps achieve the overarching objective of sustainable Internet functioning technology by measuring the energy and the consumption of Internet based services through a spatiotemporal framework of the network.