Energy Management in Cross-Domain Content Delivery Networks: A Theoretical Perspective

In a content delivery network (CDN), the energy cost is dominated by its geographically distributed data centers (DCs). Generally within a DC, the energy consumption is dominated by its server infrastructure and cooling system, with each contributing approximately half. However, existing research work has been addressing energy efficiency on these two sides separately. In this paper, we jointly optimize the energy consumption of both server infrastructures and cooling systems in a holistic manner. Such an objective is achieved through both strategies of: 1) putting idle servers to sleep within individual DCs; and 2) shutting down idle DCs entirely during off-peak hours. Based on these strategies, we develop a heuristic algorithm, which concentrates user request resolution to fewer DCs, so that some DCs may become completely idle and hence have the opportunity to be shut down to reduce their cooling energy consumption. Meanwhile, QoS constraints are respected in the algorithm to assure service availability and end-to-end delay. Through simulations under realistic scenarios, our algorithm is able to achieve an energy-saving gain of up to 62.1% over an existing CDN energy-saving scheme. This result is bound to be near-optimal by our theoretically-derived lower bound on energy-saving performance.