A Communication-Aware Energy-Efficient Graph-Coloring Algorithm for VM Placement in Clouds

The problem of virtual machine (VM) consolidation has received a lot of attention over the past years. Most of the proposed techniques tackling the VM consolidation problem focus on energy consumption ignoring the network traffic incurred within the system. Redundant network traffic may be crucial for the sustainability of cloud computing systems. To tackle the aforementioned problem, we propose a communication-aware graph-coloring algorithm placing the VMs in the underlying system in an energy efficient manner. Specifically, the proposed algorithm considers migrating VMs in batches resulting in energy efficient placements against approaches tackling single VM migrations. We have conducted an experimental evaluation to show the superiority of the proposed algorithm against state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of network overhead reduction, while keeping the energy consumption at low levels.