Energy-based Cost Model of Virtual Machines in a Cloud Environment

The cost mechanisms employed by different service providers significantly influence the role of cloud computing within the IT industry. With the increasing cost of electricity, Cloud providers consider power consumption as one of the major cost factors to be maintained within their infrastructures. Consequently, modelling a new cost mechanism for Cloud services that can be adjusted to the actual energy costs has attracted the attention of many researchers. This paper introduces an Energy-based Cost Model that considers energy consumption as a key parameter with respect to the actual resource usage and the total cost of the Virtual Machines (VMs). A series of experiments conducted on a Cloud testbed show that this model is capable of estimating the actual cost for heterogeneous VMs based on their resource usage with consideration of their energy consumption.