AFED-EF: An Energy-Efficient VM Allocation Algorithm for IoT Applications in a Cloud Data Center

Cloud Data Centers (CDCs) have become a vital computing infrastructure for enterprises. However, CDCs consume substantial energy due to the increased demand for computing power, especially for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Although a great deal of research in green resource allocation algorithms have been proposed to reduce the energy consumption of the CDCs, existing approaches mostly focus on minimizing the number of active Physical Machines (PMs) and rarely address the issue of load fluctuation and energy efficiency of the Virtual Machine (VM) provisions jointly. Moreover, existing approaches lack mechanisms to consider and redirect the incoming traffics to appropriate resources to optimize the Quality of Services (QoSs) provided by the CDCs. We propose a novel adaptive energy-aware VM allocation and deployment mechanism called AFED-EF for IoT applications to handle these problems. The proposed algorithm can efficiently handle the fluctuation of load and has good performance during the VM allocation and placement. We carried out extensive experimental analysis using a real-world workload based on more than a thousand PlanetLab VMs. The experimental results illustrate that AFED-EF outperforms other energy-aware algorithms in energy consumption, Service Level Agreements (SLA) violation, and energy efficiency.