Energy-Aware Task Scheduling ( EATS ) Framework for Efficient Energy in Smart Cities Cloud Computing Infrastructures

Cloud computing is an emerging technology that has an important potential in future Smart Cities’ information technology infrastructure. Cloud computing employs a heterogeneous infrastructure and a middleware aiming to provide services to users in Smart Cities. The energy consumption of the underlying data centers of the Clouds becomes a crucial issue, as Clouds come to be necessary components in a heavily used smart digital ecosystem. In this paper, we propose an energyaware task scheduling (EATS) framework, which is responsible to schedule users’ tasks in the Cloud while optimizing the energy consumption of the underlying infrastructure. This paper describes our framework, its implementation and report on energy consumption under different workload conditions. The results show that steady states servers consume 54% of energy of servers at peak usage, and that the power-off and the startup of servers counts to 54% and 68% respectively of energy consumption at servers’ peak usage in our experimental environment; suggesting that strategies based on poweroff and power-on of servers should be avoided. The results in this paper are promising directions to save energy in cloud providers’ data centers.