Power-Saving ICT Platform That Guarantees Network Bandwidth for Cloud-Service Systems

A power-saving ICT platform that guarantees network bandwidth for a cloud-service system is proposed. On this platform, virtual-machine (VM) migration and guaranteed network bandwidth are managed at the same time. In a conventional power-saving platform for an ICT system, VM migration based on CPU load is only considered. However, excessive VM migration might produce network congestion, since network flows are also aggregated as VM migration. A new VM migration function that guarantees network bandwidth (namely, maintaining service-access bandwidth from a user to a server even after the migration) is therefore proposed. On the proposed platform, loads of network traffic and servers are monitored. In addition, future loads are predicted on the basis of past-history data concerning the CPU loads and network-bandwidth load. VM migration is then executed only if enough bandwidth for accessing the VM after the migration is guaranteed. A prototype platform was constructed by open-source emulation software and real network nodes and evaluated. The evaluation results indicate that the platform can achieve power saving and migration with guaranteed network bandwidth.