EAICA: An energy-aware resource provisioning algorithm for Real-Time Cloud services

Abstract

Cloud computing is receiving an increasing attention when it comes to providing a wide range of cost-effective services. In this context, energy consumption of communication and computing resources contribute to a major portion of the cost of services. On the other hand, growing energy consumption not only results in a higher operational cost, but it also causes negative environmental impacts. A large number of cloud applications in, e.g., telecommunication, multimedia, and video gaming, have real-time requirements. A cloud computing system hosting such applications, that requires a strict timing guarantee for its provided services, is denoted a Real-Time Cloud (RTC). Minimizing energy consumption in a RTC is a complicated task as common methods that are used for decreasing energy consumption can potentially lead to timing violations. In this paper, we present an online energy-aware resource provisioning framework to reduce the deadline miss ratio for real-time cloud services. The proposed provisioning framework not only considers the energy consumption of servers but it also takes the energy consumption of the communication network into account, to provide a holistic solution. An extensive range of simulation results, based on real data, show a noticeable improvement regarding energy consumption while keeping the number of timing violations less than 1% in average.