Accountable energy monitoring for green service routing in the cloud

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of G-Route (Green Route), an autonomic service routing protocol for constructing energy-efficient service provider paths in collaborative cloud computing architectures. The chief contribution of this work resides in autonomously selecting the optimal set of composite service components sustaining the most efficient energy consumption characteristics among a set of providers for executing a particular consumer service request. The routing protocol processes accountable service energy measurements extracted securely from within the provider sites or data centers using trusted computing technologies and cryptographic mechanisms. By pushing green computing constraints into the service routing protocol decision engine, we can leverage the collaborative cloud computing service model to maximize the energy savings achieved by focusing on a path of providers that executes the service requests instead of directing the green computing efforts towards a single provider site. The major goal of G-Route is to enhance the energy savings in the overall cloud computing infrastructure. The protocol design is deployed in a real cloud computing environment using the Amazon EC2 cloud platform. The analyses of the protocol convergence characteristics, traffic overhead, and resilience demonstrate the capability of the proposed system to significantly reduce the overall energy requirements of collaborative cloud services.