Paper detail

A Graph-based Perspective to Total Carbon Footprint Assessment of Non-marginal Technology-driven Projects - Use case of OTT/IPTV

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of green and sustainable projects has been found to be a necessary analysis in order to include all upstream, downstream, and indirect impacts. Because of the complexity of interactions, the differential impacts with respect to a baseline, i.e., a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, are commonly considered to relatively compare various projects. However, as the degree of penetration of a project in the baseline increases, the popular marginal assumption does no longer hold, and the differential impacts may become inconsistent. Although various mythologies have been successfully proposed and used to contain such a side effect, the bottom-up nature, which initiates the assessment from the project itself and ultimately widens the scope, could easily fail to acknowledge critical modifications to the baseline. This is highly relevant in terms of ICT's disruptive and dynamic technologies which push the baseline to become a marginal legacy. In this work, an analytic formalism is presented to provide a means of comparison of such technologies and projects. The core idea behind the proposed methodology is a magnitude-insensitive graph-based distance function to differentially compare a project with a baseline. The applicability of the proposed methodology is then evaluated in a use case of OTT/IPTV online media distribution services.