Work

Local Computing vs. Cloud Computing: An Empirical Study of Energy Consumption

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: The dominance of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has raised sustainability concerns due to its reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure and increasing energy consumption. This paper investigates a core principle of the Local-First Software (LoFi) paradigm, local processing (LP), as a potential alternative. Through a controlled empirical study using SeekTune, an open-source music recognition application, we compare the end-user device and server energy consumption and data usage of an LP architecture against a traditional SaaS model for a computationally intensive task. Our results demonstrate that, while LP consumes more energy on the client device, the combined energy cost of data transmission and server-side computation in the SaaS model often results in a larger total systemic footprint. In addition, LP transmits considerably less data over the network than SaaS. For modern mobile devices, processing locally can be significantly more energy-efficient overall. These findings challenge the long-held assumption that cloud offloading is inherently superior, and position the LP aspect of LoFi as a crucial consideration for sustainable software design.

Source: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC)

DOI: 10.1145/3773274.3774278

Authors: Lylian Siffre, Thomas Ledoux, Renaud Pawlak, John Guery

Institutions: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique, Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes, IMT Atlantique, Nantes Université

Language: English

Topic: Green IT and Sustainability

Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Affordable and clean energy, Industry, innovation and infrastructure, Climate action

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: Association Nationale de la Recherche et de la Technologie