Minimizing the provisioning delay in the cloud network: Benefits, overheads and challenges

In the cloud computing era, virtualized data centers are expected to host most of the cloud services such as computation, storage and multimedia applications. Cloud services are expected to be transported over the Internet backbone based on anycast/manycast paradigms between the users and data centers. In this paper, we present an optimization model which aims at reconfiguring the cloud network topology so that the delay of cloud service provisioning is minimized without disrupting the service quality of regular Internet services. We compare the performance of the proposed model to the delay performance of an optimization model which aims at minimizing the operational expenditure of the operator. Through numerical results, we show that the proposed optimization model is capable of assuring minimum delay guarantee for the traffic demands destined to/from the data centers, as well as the traffic demands destined to/from the core nodes of the cloud network. Furthermore, we study the overheads and challenges of delay minimized reconfiguration of the cloud network. Numerical results confirm that minimum delay objective does not introduce significant overhead to the data centers in terms of operational expenditure, namely power consumption. On the other hand, we show that the increase in the power consumption of the network equipment in the cloud backbone arises as an important challenge of the presented optimization model.