Power-Efficient Provisioning for Online Virtual Network Requests in Cloud-Based Data Centers

A cloud computing paradigm enables users to access services, applications, and infrastructure resources by using thin clients anywhere and at any time. In this paradigm, multiple users can share cloud infrastructure resources. The application or service requests from a user can be abstracted as a virtual network (VN) request and can be submitted to the cloud-based data centers. How to map a VN onto the cloud infrastructure network is a challenging issue in cloud resource provisioning. Thus, efficient mapping techniques that intelligently use the resources of cloud infrastructure are important and necessary. Current research on VN mapping and design focuses on resource-efficient VN mapping or cost-efficient VN mapping. However, there is another important issue in cloud-based data centers that we must pay attention to, i.e., the amount of power or energy that is consumed by a data center. The power consumption in data centers can be a significant percentage of the total power consumption, and it not only leads to a higher data center operating cost but also contributes to carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect. In this paper, we propose a power-efficient resource provisioning technique in cloud-based data centers while complying with service level agreements. We first model a power-efficient VN provisioning problem as a mathematical optimization problem, with the objective of minimizing the power consumption by employing mixed-integer programming. We then propose a heuristic algorithm to efficiently solve this model since this optimization problem is NP-hard. We validate and evaluate our framework and algorithm by conducting extensive simulations on different cloud infrastructure networks under various scenarios. The simulation results show that our approach performs well.