Overcoming the energy versus delay trade-off in cloud network reconfiguration

Cloud computing calls for efficient solutions to manage the energy consumption of the transport, process and storage services. Recently, we have shown that energy savings in the cloud network and the data centers are at the expense of increased delay; hence degraded service quality. In this paper we propose a new scheme, Delay and Power Minimized Provisioning (DePoMiP) to address energy versus delay tradeoff in the cloud network. DePoMiP reconfigures the cloud network and provisions the demands by jointly minimizing the energy consumption and propagation delay. Through simulations, we compare DePoMiP to our previously proposed heuristics for delay-minimized provisioning and power-minimized provisioning of the demands. Simulation results show that DePoMiP mimics power-minimized provisioning in terms of power consumption while it provisions the demands with a few microseconds higher propagation delay when compared to delay-minimized provisioning. Furthermore, its low channel utilization in the IP over WDM transport network, as well as its fairness among the nodes in terms of power consumption, makes DePoMiP a promising solution for the problem of energy-efficient reconfiguration of the cloud network.