Use cases regarding enhancements to Energy Efficiency of 5G network and application service enabler aspects are listed in TR 22.882. Five of them have been identified as media-related and therefore fall within the scope of this study:

• Use case 5.5 on service energy monitoring by an Application Server: The Application Service Provider cares about energy consumption in the Data Network as a result of the service provided by an Application Server to UEs. This could be for one or more of the following three reasons:
  • The Application Service Provider needs to demonstrate that it is reducing energy consumption;
  • The service has an associated energy cost, and the Application Service Provider wants to reduce it;
  • The Application Service Provider recognises that there are policies that limit energy use and controls the overall use of the service to operate within those constraints.
• Use case 5.6 on supporting service-level energy efficiency analysis for verticals: An Application Service Provider is running three different enterprise applications over two network slices. It proposes exposure of data volume and energy consumption of different Network Functions participating in the delivery of the service for different time periods at the request of the Application Service Provider. The Application Service Provider may use existing 3GPP procedures to infer Network Slice energy consumption and the number of PDU sessions per network slice.
• Use case 5.8 on Application service Energy Efficiency (AEE) monitoring: The energy consumed by an application service at the device side as well as at the network side is monitored and predicted by the 5G System and is exposed as a monitoring event to the Application Service Provider to allow an application layer action. In the context of media delivery, this action could be for example triggering multicast/broadcast delivery for a given service area and time of the day.
• Use case 5.9 on renewable energy consumption information exposure: Mobile Network Operators need to understand and track the proportion of energy consumed in their networks that is sourced from renewable sources, which can be made available to customers and authorized third parties.
• Use case 5.10 on supporting carbon-aware communication service: The Mobile Network Operator provides to end users an estimate of the carbon emissions for the services consumed, for example the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions corresponding to the data consumed by a user during a particular billing cycle.
• Use case 5.14 on reducing GHG footprint of Application Services: By considering the temporal and spatial information of sustainable energy source and availability, the possibility of reduction of the greenhouse gas footprint for application services is explored. Rather than optimising compute tasks for highest throughput or lowest latency, those tasks having flexibility in both when and where they are executed (e.g., some AI/ML training or video processing) are routed to a computing node using the (most) sustainable energy sources at that moment.

Media-related requirements associated with these use cases are addressed in the following Key Issues, complemented by requirements associated with the findings identified in clause 4.

Use cases defined by SA WG1 on energy monitoring or energy consumption information exposure are not yet taken into consideration in 26.XXX series specifications but similar use cases have already been addressed. As explained in clause 4.2.2.4, some mechanisms like UE data collection, reporting and event exposure have already been defined. For consistency between specifications, supporting the collection and exposure of UE energy consumption information will require expansion of these existing mechanisms or else the use of mechanisms widely deployed in the market. This expansion will have to take into consideration indicators requested by regulators. In France, the "Chaize Act" on reinforcing regulation of the digital sector by Arcep (France's Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications, Postal Affairs and Press Distribution), strengthens Arcep's powers by giving it the ability to collect environmental data not only from electronic communications operators, but also from online communication service providers, data centre operators, consumer device manufacturers, network equipment suppliers and operating system providers. Arcep has been collecting indicators since 2020 from France's four largest telecoms operators, to be able to track the evolution of their environmental footprint, and relays this information through the publication of its annual "Achieving digital sustainability" survey [57]. The fourth edition of the survey, which Arcep will be publishing in early 2025, will incorporate data for monitoring the environmental footprint of a new category of player, namely mobile network equipment suppliers. This work has been complemented by Arcom (the French Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication) in its recommendation n° 2023-02 about consumer information on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions equivalents of data consumption related to the use of television services, on-demand audiovisual media services and video sharing platform services. In addition to collecting energy consumption information from UEs and exposing it to event consumers, Arcom encourages collection and exposure of energy consumption information to UEs could help to address the energy efficiency issue. This would be used to inform users about the environmental impact of consuming audiovisual content, but this information could also be used by UEs to optimise energy efficiency associated with media consumption. Arcom also encourages service providers to offer access to video quality parameter settings, allowing an easy way for end users to choose a simple "energy efficiency" mode. Instead of always being in a "best video performances according to network conditions regardless energy consumption" mode, having data on the QoE and energy consumption could enable a second mode to be offered to users representing reasonably good video performance with good energy efficiency. Having this information, instead of having a manual selection of video bit rates or SDR/HDR modes, the 5GMS Client could automatically select the best compromise to offer this additional mode to the users. Regulators like Arcom also encourage TV services, VoD services, video sharing platforms and other actors in the sector to put in place a common methodology for calculating the environmental impact of audiovisual uses. This work will have to be follow as the study item plans to study the feasibility of having implementation-independent metrics and a framework to evaluate the energy usage/savings of multimedia standards features and proposals.