1. Videoconferencing – a way to reduce GHG emission
GN3 Green Workshop, Utrecht
5-6/03/2012
Tamas Maray
NIIF/Hungarnet

2. Videoconferencing at the Hungarian NREN
IP based VC service since 2002
Country wide coverage
Infrastrfucture is (mainly) owned and operated by the NREN
Rich service portfolio (MCU, booking, gatekeeper, directory, recording and archiving, streaming, VoIP and PSTN gateways, statistics)
Today more than 150 (mostly HD) VC rooms + hundreds of desktop clients (Vidyo) deployed

3. Videoconferencing benefits
You save (travelling) money
You save (working) hours
You save GHG emissions
You save efforts and inconveniences (of travelling)
but at the same time
You lose f2f contact with your partners (as well as you lose part of the information!)
You lose experiences (of travelling and visiting) and discovering
You lose social events and contacts

4. Promoting the usage of videoconferencing
General usage is „satisfying”, increasing, but still there are lots of unused possibilities and spare capacity
There is a barrier to overcome! (people don't use it, because they don't know it)
Education of the users is important
Producing promotional materials (leaflets, best practises, case studies, videos)
Organising a roadshow
Demonstrating the benefits of videoconferencing – part of this is GHG emission and time savings calculation

5. A new service for the subscribed users
Users can follow their GHG emission and time savings of using of VC on the NREN CRM portal
A tool has been developed to calculate the above savings and present the results for the users
Precise calculation is nearly impossible: it is rather a rough – but conservative! - estimation based on the available data of VC sessions

6. Main goal
Calculate the working hour requirement and GHG emission caused by a hypothetical f2f meeting (which has been replaced by a real VC) as precisely as possible.
If precise calculation is impossible: stay on the conservative side
Results should be interpreted: „at least”

7. The most important sources of information
The central gatekeeper logfiles of the VC sessions (CDR)
Location information of VC endpoints (codecs)
Route information between parties
Speed (time required) and GHG emission of different transportation means

8. About the code PHP + MySQL + Drupal CMS API
Google Distance Matrix API (Google Maps) – webservice – built in application cacheing!
(free)GeoIP
txt format config file

9. Algorythm
Processing the call records of the gatekeeper logfile and save the relevant information in an internal database (done in a separate module, could be tailored to various log formats!)
Resolving the location of participants (based on GDS number, IP address or H.323 ID)
Calculating the distances
Computing the travelling time and GHG emissions (tunable constants of calculation stored in the config fájl)
Considering the electricity consumption of VC equipments (deduction!)
Generating and displaying the results

10. Assumptions and simplifications
Throwing away the conferences shorter than 5 minutes (parameter!)(could be tests)
Throwing away participants where location cannot be resolved
Theorethical meeting place: the location of the first participant joined
Number of participants: one per location
Travelling means: car, train, air (depending on distance, no combination of them, no transfers)
Distance is <300 km – car
Distance is >300 km and <500 km train
Distance is >500 km air

11. Location resolution The weakest (and most difficult) point
Not always possible
It is good to have a location database about the known endpoints!
Using geoIP and google maps services

12. Displaying the results
Monthly, yearly reports on GHG and working hour savings
Filtering possibilities (by time, by participant)
Details of a given conference and corresponding calculation
Displaying the assumed locations of a conference participants on (google) map