The negative human influence on global warming is today recognized and calls for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It is estimated that the ICT sector contributes to this negative phenomenon by accounting for 1.5 to 3% of GHG emissions, which has given way to research activities on the development of sustainable ICT-based services in the last years. Video streaming particularly contributes to GHG emissions because of the rising prominence of video streaming platforms, videoconferencing services, and social media applications, which have led video traffic to account for almost 66% of current global Internet traffic. The management of such high multimedia traffic, combined with the increasing high-quality expectations of users and the growing level of application immersiveness (e.g., Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, 360 Videos, Metaverse), has made the integration of user-centered approaches increasingly important for application and network providers. However, research studies accounting for both the Quality of Experience (QoE) and energy consumption of multimedia services are still limited in the state-of-the-art. Most of these studies are often focused on designing algorithms to improve the usage of renewable energy sources, reduce the overall processing computational complexity, optimize resource utilization, reduce the amount of stored and transmitted data, and switch off devices when not needed.

This special session focuses on research contributions centered on multimedia communications and services designed to provide a sustainable quality of multimedia experience, which implies the employment of sustainable systems, strategies, and algorithms that minimize the impact on the environment and optimize the selection of the resources required in the network and on the server side to ensure that the end user’s target quality levels are reached not to compromise the user’s QoE.