Virtual network embedding for power savings of servers and switches in elastic data center networks

Abstract

Currently, the elastic interconnection has realized the high-rate data transmission among data centers (DCs). Thus, the elastic data center network (EDCN) emerged. In EDCNs, it is essential to achieve the virtual network (VN) embedding, which includes two main components: VM (virtual machine) mapping and VL (virtual link) mapping. In VM mapping, we allocate appropriate servers to hold VMs. While for VL mapping, an optimal substrate path is determined for each virtual lightpath. For the VN embedding in EDCNs, the power efficiency is a significant concern, and some solutions were proposed through sleeping light-duty servers. However, the increasing communication traffic between VMs leads to a serious energy dissipation problem, since it also consumes a great amount of energy on switches even utilizing the energy-efficient optical transmission technique. In this paper, considering load balancing and power-efficient VN embedding, we formulate the problem and design a novel heuristic for EDCNs, with the objective to achieve the power savings of servers and switches. In our solution, VMs are mapped into a single DC or multiple DCs with the short distance between each other, and the servers in the same cluster or adjacent clusters are preferred to hold VMs. Such that, a large amount of servers and switches will become vacant and can go into sleep mode. Simulation results demonstrate that our method performs well in terms of power savings and load balancing. Compared with benchmarks, the improvement ratio of power efficiency is 5%–13%.

创新点

本文将考虑了负载均衡的虚拟网络嵌入能效问题抽象成数学模型, 并提出了一种综合考虑服务器和交换机能耗的绿色虚拟网络嵌入算法, 力求将虚拟机映射到彼此物理距离更近的服务器中, 并根据链路频谱信息和交换机当前能耗设置链路代价, 以指导虚拟链路进行节能性的映射。通过大量仿真, 本文证明了所提出算法在节能和负载均衡方面的优势。