14,671 research outputs found
Energy-efficient Communications in Cloud, Mobile Cloud and Fog Computing
This thesis studies the problem of energy efficiency of communications in distributed computing paradigms, including cloud computing, mobile cloud computing and fog/edge computing. Distributed computing paradigms have significantly changed the way of doing business. With cloud computing, companies and end users can access the vast majority services online through a virtualized environment in a pay-as-you-go basis. %Three are the main services typically consumed by cloud users are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Mobile cloud and fog/edge computing are the natural extension of the cloud computing paradigm for mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Based on offloading, the process of outsourcing computing tasks from mobile devices to the cloud, mobile cloud and fog/edge computing paradigms have become popular techniques to augment the capabilities of the mobile devices and to reduce their battery drain. Being equipped with a number of sensors, the proliferation of mobile and IoT devices has given rise to a new cloud-based paradigm for collecting data, which is called mobile crowdsensing as for proper operation it requires a large number of participants.
A plethora of communication technologies is applicable to distributing computing paradigms. For example, cloud data centers typically implement wired technologies while mobile cloud and fog/edge environments exploit wireless technologies such as 3G/4G, WiFi and Bluetooth. Communication technologies directly impact the performance and the energy drain of the system. This Ph.D. thesis analyzes from a global perspective the efficiency in using energy of communications systems in distributed computing paradigms. In particular, the following contributions are proposed:
- A new framework of performance metrics for communication systems of cloud computing data centers. The proposed framework allows a fine-grain analysis and comparison of communication systems, processes, and protocols, defining their influence on the performance of cloud applications.
- A novel model for the problem of computation offloading, which describes the workflow of mobile applications through a new Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technique. This methodology is suitable for IoT devices working in fog computing environments and was used to design an Android application, called TreeGlass, which performs recognition of trees using Google Glass. TreeGlass is evaluated experimentally in different offloading scenarios by measuring battery drain and time of execution as key performance indicators.
- In mobile crowdsensing systems, novel performance metrics and a new framework for data acquisition, which exploits a new policy for user recruitment. Performance of the framework are validated through CrowdSenSim, which is a new simulator designed for mobile crowdsensing activities in large scale urban scenarios
Toward sustainable data centers: a comprehensive energy management strategy
Data centers are major contributors to the emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and this contribution is expected to increase in the following years. This has encouraged the development of techniques to reduce the energy consumption and the environmental footprint of data centers. Whereas some of these techniques have succeeded to reduce the energy consumption of the hardware equipment of data centers (including IT, cooling, and power supply systems), we claim that sustainable data centers will be only possible if the problem is faced by means of a holistic approach that includes not only the aforementioned techniques but also intelligent and unifying solutions that enable a synergistic and energy-aware management of data centers.
In this paper, we propose a comprehensive strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers that uses the energy as a driver of their management procedures. In addition, we present a holistic management architecture for sustainable data centers that implements the aforementioned strategy, and we propose design guidelines to accomplish each step of the proposed strategy, referring to related achievements and enumerating the main challenges that must be still solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
A Taxonomy for Management and Optimization of Multiple Resources in Edge Computing
Edge computing is promoted to meet increasing performance needs of
data-driven services using computational and storage resources close to the end
devices, at the edge of the current network. To achieve higher performance in
this new paradigm one has to consider how to combine the efficiency of resource
usage at all three layers of architecture: end devices, edge devices, and the
cloud. While cloud capacity is elastically extendable, end devices and edge
devices are to various degrees resource-constrained. Hence, an efficient
resource management is essential to make edge computing a reality. In this
work, we first present terminology and architectures to characterize current
works within the field of edge computing. Then, we review a wide range of
recent articles and categorize relevant aspects in terms of 4 perspectives:
resource type, resource management objective, resource location, and resource
use. This taxonomy and the ensuing analysis is used to identify some gaps in
the existing research. Among several research gaps, we found that research is
less prevalent on data, storage, and energy as a resource, and less extensive
towards the estimation, discovery and sharing objectives. As for resource
types, the most well-studied resources are computation and communication
resources. Our analysis shows that resource management at the edge requires a
deeper understanding of how methods applied at different levels and geared
towards different resource types interact. Specifically, the impact of mobility
and collaboration schemes requiring incentives are expected to be different in
edge architectures compared to the classic cloud solutions. Finally, we find
that fewer works are dedicated to the study of non-functional properties or to
quantifying the footprint of resource management techniques, including
edge-specific means of migrating data and services.Comment: Accepted in the Special Issue Mobile Edge Computing of the Wireless
Communications and Mobile Computing journa
An Algorithm for Network and Data-aware Placement of Multi-Tier Applications in Cloud Data Centers
Today's Cloud applications are dominated by composite applications comprising
multiple computing and data components with strong communication correlations
among them. Although Cloud providers are deploying large number of computing
and storage devices to address the ever increasing demand for computing and
storage resources, network resource demands are emerging as one of the key
areas of performance bottleneck. This paper addresses network-aware placement
of virtual components (computing and data) of multi-tier applications in data
centers and formally defines the placement as an optimization problem. The
simultaneous placement of Virtual Machines and data blocks aims at reducing the
network overhead of the data center network infrastructure. A greedy heuristic
is proposed for the on-demand application components placement that localizes
network traffic in the data center interconnect. Such optimization helps
reducing communication overhead in upper layer network switches that will
eventually reduce the overall traffic volume across the data center. This, in
turn, will help reducing packet transmission delay, increasing network
performance, and minimizing the energy consumption of network components.
Experimental results demonstrate performance superiority of the proposed
algorithm over other approaches where it outperforms the state-of-the-art
network-aware application placement algorithm across all performance metrics by
reducing the average network cost up to 67% and network usage at core switches
up to 84%, as well as increasing the average number of application deployments
up to 18%.Comment: Submitted for publication consideration for the Journal of Network
and Computer Applications (JNCA). Total page: 28. Number of figures: 15
figure
Energy-aware Load Balancing Policies for the Cloud Ecosystem
The energy consumption of computer and communication systems does not scale
linearly with the workload. A system uses a significant amount of energy even
when idle or lightly loaded. A widely reported solution to resource management
in large data centers is to concentrate the load on a subset of servers and,
whenever possible, switch the rest of the servers to one of the possible sleep
states. We propose a reformulation of the traditional concept of load balancing
aiming to optimize the energy consumption of a large-scale system: {\it
distribute the workload evenly to the smallest set of servers operating at an
optimal energy level, while observing QoS constraints, such as the response
time.} Our model applies to clustered systems; the model also requires that the
demand for system resources to increase at a bounded rate in each reallocation
interval. In this paper we report the VM migration costs for application
scaling.Comment: 10 Page
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