On energy-awareness for peer-assisted streaming with set-top boxes

Energy consumption is responsible for a large fraction of costs in today´s content distribution networks. In upcoming decentralized architectures based on set-top boxes (STB), acting as tiny servers, idle times can dominate distribution costs, since no cooling costs occurs and the Internet access is often paid in a flat-rate manner. The often assumed always-on property of STBs provides high availability but might also waste up to 93% of the baseline energy. In this paper we consider suitable standby policies that reduce energy consumption but still allow offloading content servers significantly. We devise optimal and heuristic standby policies and evaluate them in a realistic scenario to show that a near-optimal behavior can be reached by utilizing the specific features of STBs.