NetCarbTrace-Dataset

Reducing the carbon footprint of Internet traffic requires accurate, context-aware models of energy consumption across heterogeneous network paths. Existing estimation approaches are often overly simplistic, relying on fixed energy-per-byte values that ignore critical factors such as transmission distance, number of hops, and regional variations in energy sources. We developed NetCarbTrace (NCT), a probing tool that uses ICMP-based hop tracing and maps network devices to regional CI values. Using NCT, we collected and analyzed a two-month dataset covering 43 AWS and Azure endpoints, highlighting how real-world paths can vary significantly in their carbon impact. Each record in the dataset representsdetailed routing and performance metrics captured at various hops between a source and destination IP.