Green Provisioning of Cloud Services over Wireless-Optical Broadband Access Networks

Abstract

Today's access networks are increasingly shaped by the services that they provide to the end users. In a hybrid wireless-optical broadband access network (WOBAN), to access any service, connection requests require multi-hop communications over the wireless mesh network (WMN) and the Passive Optical Network (PON), and subsequently over the Internet to some server in the service provider's domain. To improve the delivery of such services over WOBAN, we can design a Cloud-Integrated WOBAN (CIW) by deploying a few cloud components (CCs) in the WOBAN itself and serve local services from these local CCs. In this paper, we propose a novel energy-saving routing mechanism, called Green Routing for CIW (GRC), that manages the activation of network components, namely ONUs and CCs, to minimize the overall energy consumption of CIW. It performs load-balanced anycast routing across active devices. Our performance evaluation shows that GRC operates with low average packet delay and achieves significant energy savings by turning off about 50% of the ONUs and about 20% of the CCs.