ENERGY EFFICIENT VIRTUAL NETWORK EMBEDDING FOR CLOUD NETWORKS

  • ABSTRACT:

In this paper, we propose an energy efficient virtual network embedding (EEVNE) approach for cloud computing networks, where power savings are introduced by consolidating resources in the network and data centers. We model our approach in an IP over WDM network using mixed integer linear programming (MILP). The performance of the EEVNE approach is compared with two approaches from the literature: the bandwidth cost approach (CostVNE) and the energy aware approach (VNE-EA). The CostVNE approach optimizes the use of available bandwidth, while the VNE-EA approach minimizes the power consumption by reducing the number of activated nodes and links without taking into account the granular power consumption of the data centers and the different network devices.

The results show that the EEVNE model achieves a maximum power saving of 60% (average 20%) compared to the CostVNE model under an energy inefficient data center power profile. We develop a heuristic, real-time energy optimized VNE (REOViNE), with power savings approaching those of the EEVNE model. We also compare the different approaches adopting energy efficient data center power profile. Furthermore, we study the impact of delay and node location constraints on the energy efficiency of virtual network embedding. We also show how VNE can impact the design of optimally located data centers for minimal power consumption in cloud networks. Finally, we examine the power savings and spectral efficiency benefits that VNE offers in optical orthogonal division multiplexing networks.

  • INTRODUCTION:

The ever growing uptake of cloud computing as a widely accepted computing paradigm calls for novel architectures to support QoS and energy efficiency in networks and data centers. Estimates indicate that in the long term, if current trends continue, the annual energy bill paid by data center operators will exceed the cost of equipment. Given the ecological and economic impact, both academia and industry are focusing efforts on developing energy efficient paradigms for cloud computing. In, the authors stated that the success of future cloud networks where clients are expected to be able to specify the data rate and processing requirements for hosted applications and services will greatly depend on network virtualization. The form of cloud computing service offering under study here is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS is the delivery of virtualized and dynamically scalable computing power, storage and networking on demand to clients on a pay as you go basis.

Network virtualization allows multiple heterogeneous virtual network architectures (comprising virtual nodes and links) to coexist on a shared physical platform, known as the substrate network which is owned and operated by an infrastructure provider (InP) or cloud service provider whose aim is to earn a profit from leasing network resources to its customers (Service Providers (SPs)). It provides scalability, customised and on demand allocation of resources and the promise of efficient use of network resources. Network virtualization is therefore a strong proponent for the realization of an efficient IaaS framework in cloud networks. InPs should have a resource allocation framework that reserves and allocates physical resources to elements such as virtual nodes and virtual links. Resource allocation is done using a class of algorithms commonly known as “virtual network embedding (VNE)” algorithms. The dynamic mapping of virtual resources onto the physical hardware maximizes the benefits gained from existing hardware. The VNE problem can be either Offline or Online. In offline problems all the virtual network requests (VNRs) are known and scheduled in advance while for the online problem, VNRs arrive dynamically and can stay in the network for an arbitrary duration.

Both online and offline problems are known to be NPhard. With constraints on virtual nodes and links, the offline VNE problem can be reduced to the NP-hard multiway separator problem, as a result, most of the work done in this area has focused on the design of heuristic algorithms and the use of networks with minimal complexity when solving mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models. Network virtualization has been proposed as an enabler of energy savings by means of resource consolidation. In all these proposals, the VNE models and/or algorithms do not address the link embedding problem as a multi-layer problem spanning from the virtualization layer through the IP layer and all the way to the optical layer. Except for the authors in, the others do not consider the power consumption of network ports/links as being related to the actual traffic passing through them.

On the contrary, we take a very generic, detailed and accurate approach towards energy efficient VNE (EEVNE) where we allow the model to decide the optimum approach to minimize the total network and data centers server power consumption. We consider the granular power consumption of various network elements that form the network engine in backbone networks as well as the power consumption in data centers. We develop a MILP model and a real-time heuristic to represent the EEVNE approach for clouds in IP over WDM networks with data centers. We study the energy efficiency considering two different power consumption profiles for servers in data centers; An energy inefficient power profile and an energy efficient power profile. Our work also investigates the impact of location and delay constraints in a practical enterprise solution of VNE in clouds. Furthermore we show how VNE can impact the design problem of optimally locating data centers for minimal power consumption in cloud networks.

  • LITRATURE SURVEY:

RESOURCE ALLOCATION IN A NETWORK-BASED CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT: DESIGN CHALLENGES

AUTHOR: M. A. Sharkh, M. Jammal, A. Shami, and A. Ouda

PUBLISH: IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 51, no. 11, pp. 46–52, 2013.

EXPLANATION:

Cloud computing is a utility computing paradigm that has become a solid base for a wide array of enterprise and end-user applications. Providers offer varying service portfolios that differ in resource configurations and provided services. A comprehensive solution for resource allocation is fundamental to any cloud computing service provider. Any resource allocation model has to consider computational resources as well as network resources to accurately reflect practical demands. Another aspect that should be considered while provisioning resources is energy consumption. This aspect is getting more attention from industrial and government parties. Calls for the support of green clouds are gaining momentum. With that in mind, resource allocation algorithms aim to accomplish the task of scheduling virtual machines on the servers residing in data centers and consequently scheduling network resources while complying with the problem constraints. Several external and internal factors that affect the performance of resource allocation models are introduced in this article. These factors are discussed in detail, and research gaps are pointed out. Design challenges are discussed with the aim of providing a reference to be used when designing a comprehensive energy-aware resource allocation model for cloud computing data centers.

DISTRIBUTED ENERGY EFFICIENT CLOUDS OVER CORE NETWORKS

AUTHOR: A. Q. Lawey, T. E. H. El-Gorashi, and J. M. H. Elmirghani

PUBLISH: IEEE J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 32, no. 7, pp. 1261–1281, Jan. 2014.

EXPLANATION:

In this paper, we introduce a framework for designing energy efficient cloud computing services over non-bypass IP/WDM core networks. We investigate network related factors including the centralization versus distribution of clouds and the impact of demand, content popularity and access frequency on the clouds placement, and cloud capability factors including the number of servers, switches and routers and amount of storage required in each cloud. We study the optimization of three cloud services: cloud content delivery, storage as a service (StaaS), and virtual machines (VMS) placement for processing applications. First, we develop a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to optimize cloud content delivery services. Our results indicate that replicating content into multiple clouds based on content popularity yields 43% total saving in power consumption compared to power un-aware centralized content delivery. Based on the model insights, we develop an energy efficient cloud content delivery heuristic, DEER-CD, with comparable power efficiency to the MILP results. Second, we extend the content delivery model to optimize StaaS applications. The results show that migrating content according to its access frequency yields up to 48% network power savings compared to serving content from a single central location. Third, we optimize the placement of VMs to minimize the total power consumption. Our results show that slicing the VMs into smaller VMs and placing them in proximity to their users saves 25% of the total power compared to a single virtualized cloud scenario. We also develop a heuristic for real time VM placement (DEER-VM) that achieves comparable power savings.

Reducing power consumption in embedding virtual infrastructures

AUTHOR: B. Wang, X. Chang, J. Liu, and J. K. Muppala

PUBLISH: c. IEEE Globecom Workshops, Dec. 3–7, 2012, pp. 714–718.

EXPLANATION:

Network virtualization is considered to be not only an enabler to overcome the inflexibility of the current Internet infrastructure but also an enabler to achieve an energy-efficient Future Internet. Virtual network embedding (VNE) is a critical issue in network virtualization technology. This paper explores a joint power-aware node and link resource allocation approach to handle the VNE problem with the objective of minimizing energy consumption. We first present a generalized power consumption model of embedding a VN. Then we formulate the problem as a mixed integer program and propose embedding algorithms. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms perform better than the existing algorithms in terms of the power consumption in the overprovisioned scenarios.

SYSTEM ANALYSIS

EXISTING SYSTEM:

Existing methods of disaster-resilient optical datacenter networks through integer linear programming (ILP) and heuristics addressed content placement, routing, and protection of network and content for geographically distributed cloud services delivered by optical networks models and heuristics are developed to minimize delay and power consumption of clouds over IP/WDM networks. The authors of exploited anycast routing by intelligently selecting destinations and routes for users traffic served by clouds over optical networks, as opposed to unicast traffic, while switching off unused network elements. A unified, online, and weighted routing and scheduling algorithm is presented in for a typical optical cloud infrastructure considering the energy consumption of the network and IT resources.

In the authors provided an optimization-based framework, where the objective functions range from minimizing the energy and bandwidth cost to minimizing the total carbon footprint subject to QoS constraints. Their model decides where to build a data center, how many servers are needed in each datacenter and how to route requests. In we built a MILP model to study the energy efficiency of public cloud for content delivery over non-bypass IP/WDM core networks. The model optimizes clouds external factors including the location of the cloud in the IP/WDM network and whether the cloud should be centralized or distributed and cloud internal capability factors including the number of servers, internal LAN switches, routers, and amount of storage required in each cloud.

DISADVANTAGES:

(i) Studying the impact of small content (storage) size on the energy efficiency of cloud content delivery

(ii) Developing a real time heuristic for energy aware content delivery based on the content delivery model insights,

(iii) Extending the content delivery model to study the Storage as a Service (StaaS) application,

(iv) ILP model for energy aware cloud VM placement and designing a heuristic to mimic the model behaviour in real time.

PROPOSED SYSTEM:

We developed a MILP model which attempts to minimize the bandwidth cost of embedding a VNR. In the virtual network embedding energy aware (VNE-EA) model minimized the energy consumption by imposing the notion that the power consumption is minimized by switching off substrate links and nodes. The authors also assume that the power saved in switching off a substrate link is the same as the power saved by switching off a substrate node.

In the authors assumed that the power consumption in the network is insensitive to the number of ports used. They also seek to minimize the number of active working nodes and links. Botero and Hesselbach have proposed a model for energy efficiency using load balancing and have also developed a dynamic heuristic that reconfigures the embedding for energy efficiency once it is performed. They have implemented and evaluated their MILP models and heuristic algorithms using the ALEVIN Framework. The ALEVIN Framework is a good tool for developing, comparing and analyzing VNE algorithms.

The performance of the EEVNE approach is compared with two approaches from the literature: the bandwidth cost approach (CostVNE) and the energy aware approach (VNE-EA). The CostVNE approach optimizes the use of available bandwidth, while the VNE-EA approach minimizes the power consumption by reducing the number of activated nodes and links without taking into account the granular power consumption of the data centers and the different network devices.

The results show that the EEVNE model achieves a maximum power saving of 60% (average 20%) compared to the CostVNE model under energy inefficient data center power profile. We develop a heuristic, real-time energy optimized VNE (REOViNE), with power savings approaching those of the EEVNE model.

ADVANTAGES:

We are however unable to compare our model and heuristic to the implemented algorithms on the platform for the following reasons:

  1. Our input parameters are not compatible to the existing models and algorithms on the platform. Extensive extensions to the algorithms and models would be needed for them to include the optical layer. Our parameters include among others; the distance in km between links for us to determine the number of EDFA’s or Regenerators needed on a link, the wavelength rate, the number of wavelengths in a fiber, the power consumption of EDFAs, transponders, regenerators, router ports, optical cross connects, multiplexers, de-multiplexers, etc.
  2. The assumptions made in the calculation of power in our model and the models on the platform are different. We define the power consumption to its fine granularity to include power consumed due to traffic on each element that forms the network engine. One of our main contributions in this work is the inclusion of the optical layer in link embedding which is currently not supported by any of the algorithms on the ALEVIN platform.

We developed a generalized power consumption model of embedding a VNR and formulated it as a MILP model; however, they also assumed that the power consumption of the network ports is independent of traffic. In the authors propose a trade-off between maximizing the number of VNRs that can be accommodated by the InP and minimizing the energy cost of the whole system. They propose embedding requests in regions with the lowest electricity cost.

HARDWARE & SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:

HARDWARE REQUIREMENT:

v    Processor                                 –    Pentium –IV

  • Speed       –    1 GHz
  • RAM       –    256 MB (min)
  • Hard Disk      –   20 GB
  • Floppy Drive       –    44 MB
  • Key Board      –    Standard Windows Keyboard
  • Mouse       –    Two or Three Button Mouse
  • Monitor              –    SVGA

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:

JAVA

  • Operating System        :           Windows XP or Win7
  • Front End       :           JAVA JDK 1.7
  • Document :           MS-Office 2007