A Hybrid Approach for Optimizing Carbon Footprint in InterCloud Environment

This paper focuses on the problem of workload placement in an InterCloud with the view of minimizing the carbon footprint of such a computing environment. In order to reduce the ecological impact of the data center Greenhouse Gas (GhG) emissions, this paper addresses the problem as a whole, by proposing a global mathematical formulation, based on the joint optimization of the Virtual Machine (VM) placement and their related traffics, along with a workload consolidation method and a cooling maximization technique that considers the dynamic behavior of the cooling fans. As the Virtual Machine Placement Problem (VMPP) is classified as an NP-hard problem, with the addition of the traffic embedding, the problem becomes more complex and stays NP-hard. Therefore, we propose a hybrid approach, for solving such problem and find good feasible solutions in a polynomial time. The results obtained from comparing with the exact method and other reference approaches help in assessing the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, as the carbon footprint costs are relatively close to the lower bound, with an average gap of about 3 percent, and found within a reasonable amount of time.