Designing an Energy-Efficient Cloud Network

Abstract

The emerging cloud computing offers new computing models where resources such as online applications, computing power, storage and network infrastructure can be shared as services through the internet. The popular utility computing model adopted by most cloud computing providers (e.g., Amazon EC2, Rackspace) is inspiring features for customers whose demand on virtual resources vary with time. Energy consumption is the key concern in content distribution system and most distributed systems. These demands an accumulation of networked computing resources from one or multiple providers on data centres extending over the world. This paper has introduced a framework for energy efficient cloud computing services over non-bypass IP/WDM core networks. We have analysed three cloud services, namely; content delivery, Storage as a Service (StaaS) and virtual machines based applications. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) optimization was developed for this purpose to study network related factors including the number and location of clouds in the network and the impact of demand, popularity and access frequency on the clouds placement, and cloud capability factors including the number of servers, switches and routers and amount of storage required at each cloud.