Greening the internet with nano data centers

TLDR

The authors propose Nano Data Centers (NaDa), a distributed computing platform that aims to reduce energy consumption in data centers, and evaluate its potential using Video‑on‑Demand services. NaDa is built on ISP‑controlled home gateways forming a managed peer‑to‑peer distributed data center, and the authors develop an energy‑consumption model for VoD that is evaluated with large empirical access data. The study shows that NaDa can achieve 20–30% energy savings over traditional data centers, driven by reuse of baseline power on underutilized gateways, elimination of cooling costs, and reduced network energy from demand and service co‑localization.

Abstract

Motivated by increased concern over energy consumption in modern data centers, we propose a new, distributed computing platform called Nano Data Centers (NaDa). NaDa uses ISP-controlled home gateways to provide computing and storage services and adopts a managed peer-to-peer model to form a distributed data center infrastructure. To evaluate the potential for energy savings in NaDa platform we pick Video-on-Demand (VoD) services. We develop an energy consumption model for VoD in traditional and in NaDa data centers and evaluate this model using a large set of empirical VoD access data. We find that even under the most pessimistic scenarios, NaDa saves at least 20% to 30% of the energy compared to traditional data centers. These savings stem from energy-preserving properties inherent to NaDa such as the reuse of already committed baseline power on underutilized gateways, the avoidance of cooling costs, and the reduction of network energy consumption as a result of demand and service co-localization in NaDa.