SDN-Based Data Center Energy Management System Using RES and Electric Vehicles

Cloud computing (CC) has emerged as a leading technology for providing on-demand services such as, network access, data storage, computation to end users for smooth execution of various applications. Such services are provided over physical servers hosted by large data centers (DCs) which may be geographically located. In recent times, with an increase in service requests for various resources, DCs have expanded drastically in terms of number of servers. With such an increase in high-end servers, the energy consumption of DCs has escalated many folds which may lead to additional burden on the grid. Moreover, the escalation in energy consumption of DCs has an impact on carbon footprints in the environment. Hence, the integration of renewable energy sources (RES) with DCs may ease the load of grid to a great extent. However, due to intermittent nature of RES, it is a difficult task to sustain DCs using RES. Hence, to sustain the energy consumption of DCs using RES, the penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) can be a major leap. To resolve these issues, a software-defined network (SDN)-based DC energy management system using RES and EVs is designed in this paper. In the proposed scheme, a charging- discharging mechanism for penetration of EVs is formulated to cope with the intermittent nature of RES. The results obtained clearly depict that the penetration of EVs played a major role to manage the energy consumption of DC using RES.