Power and Time Aware VM Migration for Multi-Tier Applications over Geo-Distributed Clouds

This paper proposes a virtual machine (VM) migration model to reduce the power consumption while migrating a set of VMs over geo-distributed clouds. We develop an approach to find out the migration path across different Internet Service Providers (ISPs) leading to the most feasible destination. For this, we make use of the variation in the electricity price at the ISPs for deciding the migration paths. However, reduced power consumption at the expense of higher migration time is intolerable for real-time applications. Hence, we propose an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based bi-objective optimization technique to strike a balance between the power consumption and the migration time to make the implementation realistic. Thorough simulation analysis of the proposed approach shows that it can achieve low power consumption cost with acceptable migration time.