Energy-aware joint management of networks and Cloud infrastructures

Even if in the last years a quite large research effort has been devoted to the energy efficiency of service centers and communication networks, limited work has been done for exploring the opportunities of integrated approaches able to exploit possible synergies between geographically distributed service centers and networks for accessing and interconnecting them. In this paper we propose an optimization framework able to jointly manage the use of brown and green energy in an integrated system and to guarantee quality requirements. We propose an efficient and accurate problem formulation that can be solved for real-size instances in few minutes to optimality. Numerical results, on a set of randomly generated instances and a case study representative of a large Cloud provider, show that the availability of green energy have a big impact on optimal energy management policies and that the contribution of the network is far from being negligible.