Creating green incentives and mechanisms through packet-level energy accounting

We explore the idea of accounting energy consumption of networks on packet-level. IP packets would collect the information of energy that they consumed at each hop and convey it further when travelling through the network. We describe a mechanism to do this accounting and analyze a few use cases including one where packets are given priorities based on how energy efficiently they have travelled the network. Our conclusion is that it would create incentives for Internet service providers (ISPs) to provide a more energy efficient service. In addition to creating incentives, the energy counters in packets could also be used in mechanisms to reduce the energy consumption. We also discuss the limitations and challenges in implementing and deploying such a scheme.