Green Cloud Multimedia Networking: NFV/SDN Based Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation

The rapid growth of communications and multimedia network services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) have caused these networks to face a crisis in resources from two perspectives: 1. Lack of resources and, as a result, overload; 2. Redundancy of resources and, as a result, energy loss. Cloud computing allows the scale of resources to be reduced or increased on demand. Many of the gains obtained from the cloud computing come from resource sharing and virtualization technology. On the other hand, the emerging concept of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) can provide a global view of the entire network for integrated resource management. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) can also be used to virtually implement a variety of network devices and functions. In this paper, we present an energy-efficient framework called GreenVoIP to manage the resources of virtualized cloud VoIP centers. By managing the number of VoIP servers and network equipment, such as switches, this framework not only prevents overload but also supports green computing by saving energy. Finally, GreenVoIP is implemented and evaluated on real platforms, including Floodlight, Open vSwitch, and Kamailio. The results suggest that the proposed framework can minimize the number of active devices, prevent overloading, and provide service quality requirements.