Saving Energy in QoS Networked Data Centers

One of the major challenges that cloud providers face is minimizing power consumption of their data centers. To this point, majority of current research focuses on energy efficient management of resources in the Infrastructure as a Service model using virtualization and through virtual machine consolidation. However, current virtualized data centers are not designed for supporting communication–computing intensive real-time applications, such as, info-mobility applications, real-time video co-decoding. In fact, imposing hard-limits on the overall per-job delay forces the overall networked computing infrastructure to adapt quickly its resource utilization to the (possibly, unpredictable and abrupt) time fluctuations of the offered workload. Jointly, a promising approach for making networked data centers more energy-efficient is the use of traffic engineering-based method to dynamically adapt the number of active servers to match the current workload. Therefore, it is desirable to develop a flexible and robust resource allocation algorithm that automatically adapts to time-varying workload and pays close attention to the consumed energy in computing and communication in virtualized networked data centers (VNetDCs). In this thesis, we propose three new dynamic and adaptive energy-aware algorithms scheduling policies that model and manage VNetDCs. Our focuses are to propose i) admission control of the offered input traffic; ii) balanced control and dispatching of the admitted workload; iii) dynamic reconfiguration and consolidation of the Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS)-enabled Virtual Machines (VMs) instantiated onto the parallel computing platform; and, iv) rate control of the traffic injected into the TCP/IP mobile connection. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the feasibility and optimality of the proposed schedulers are also provided in closed-form. Specifically, the first approach, called VNetDC, the optimal minimum-energy scheduler for the joint adaptive load balancing and provisioning of the computing-plus-communication resources. VNetDC platforms have been considered which operate under hard real-time constraints. VNetDC has capability to adapt to the time-varying statistical features of the offered workload without requiring any a priori assumption and/or knowledge about the statistics of the processed data. Green- NetDC is the second scheduling policy that is a flexible and robust resource allocation algorithm that automatically adapts to time-varying workload and pays close attention to the consumed energy in computing and communication in VNetDCs. GreenNetDC not only ensures users the Quality of Service (through Service Level Agreements) but also achieves maximum energy saving and attains green cloud computing goals in a fully distributed fashion by utilizing the DVFS-based CPU frequencies. Finally, the last algorithm tested an efficient dynamic resource provisioning scheduler which applied in Networked Data Centers (NetDCs). This method is connected to (possibly, mobile) clients through TCP/IP-based vehicular backbones The salient features of this algorithm is that: i) It is adaptive and admits distributed scalable implementation; ii) It is capable to provide hard QoS guarantees, in terms of minimum/maximum instantaneous rate of the traffic delivered to the client, instantaneous goodput and total processing delay; and, iii) It explicitly accounts for the dynamic interaction between computing and networking resources, in order to maximize the resulting energy efficiency. Actual performance of the proposed scheduler in the presence of :i) client mobility; ii)wireless fading; iii)reconfiguration and two-thresholds consolidation costs of the underlying networked computing platform; and, iv)abrupt changes of the transport quality of the available TCP/IP mobile connection, is numerically tested and compared against the corresponding ones of some state-of-the-art static schedulers, under both synthetically generated and measured real-world workload traces

A Survey of Green Networking Research

Reduction of unnecessary energy consumption is becoming a major concern in wired networking, because of the potential economical benefits and of its expected environmental impact. These issues, usually referred to as "green networking", relate to embedding energy-awareness in the design, in the devices and in the protocols of networks. In this work, we first formulate a more precise definition of the "green" attribute. We furthermore identify a few paradigms that are the key enablers of energy-aware networking research. We then overview the current state of the art and provide a taxonomy of the relevant work, with a special focus on wired networking. At a high level, we identify four branches of green networking research that stem from different observations on the root causes of energy waste, namely (i) Adaptive Link Rate, (ii) Interface proxying, (iii) Energy-aware infrastructures and (iv) Energy-aware applications. In this work, we do not only explore specific proposals pertaining to each of the above branches, but also offer a perspective for research.Comment: Index Terms: Green Networking; Wired Networks; Adaptive Link Rate; Interface Proxying; Energy-aware Infrastructures; Energy-aware Applications. 18 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Fog-supported delay-constrained energy-saving live migration of VMs over multiPath TCP/IP 5G connections

The incoming era of the fifth-generation fog computing-supported radio access networks (shortly, 5G FOGRANs) aims at exploiting computing/networking resource virtualization, in order to augment the limited resources of wireless devices through the seamless live migration of virtual machines (VMs) toward nearby fog data centers. For this purpose, the bandwidths of the multiple wireless network interface cards of the wireless devices may be aggregated under the control of the emerging MultiPathTCP (MPTCP) protocol. However, due to the fading and mobility-induced phenomena, the energy consumptions of the current state-of-the-art VM migration techniques may still offset their expected benefits. Motivated by these considerations, in this paper, we analytically characterize and implement in software and numerically test the optimal minimum-energy settable-complexity bandwidth manager (SCBM) for the live migration of VMs over 5G FOGRAN MPTCP connections. The key features of the proposed SCBM are that: 1) its implementation complexity is settable on-line on the basis of the target energy consumption versus implementation complexity tradeoff; 2) it minimizes the network energy consumed by the wireless device for sustaining the migration process under hard constraints on the tolerated migration times and downtimes; and 3) by leveraging a suitably designed adaptive mechanism, it is capable to quickly react to (possibly, unpredicted) fading and/or mobility-induced abrupt changes of the wireless environment without requiring forecasting. The actual effectiveness of the proposed SCBM is supported by extensive energy versus delay performance comparisons that cover: 1) a number of heterogeneous 3G/4G/WiFi FOGRAN scenarios; 2) synthetic and real-world workloads; and, 3) MPTCP and wireless connections

Energy management in communication networks: a journey through modelling and optimization glasses

The widespread proliferation of Internet and wireless applications has produced a significant increase of ICT energy footprint. As a response, in the last five years, significant efforts have been undertaken to include energy-awareness into network management. Several green networking frameworks have been proposed by carefully managing the network routing and the power state of network devices. Even though approaches proposed differ based on network technologies and sleep modes of nodes and interfaces, they all aim at tailoring the active network resources to the varying traffic needs in order to minimize energy consumption. From a modeling point of view, this has several commonalities with classical network design and routing problems, even if with different objectives and in a dynamic context. With most researchers focused on addressing the complex and crucial technological aspects of green networking schemes, there has been so far little attention on understanding the modeling similarities and differences of proposed solutions. This paper fills the gap surveying the literature with optimization modeling glasses, following a tutorial approach that guides through the different components of the models with a unified symbolism. A detailed classification of the previous work based on the modeling issues included is also proposed

CyberGuarder: a virtualization security assurance architecture for green cloud computing

Cloud Computing, Green Computing, Virtualization, Virtual Security Appliance, Security Isolation