An approach to reduce carbon dioxide emissions through virtual machine migrations in a sustainable cloud federation

Abstract

Nowadays, Cloud federation is paving the way toward new business scenarios in which it is possible to enforce more flexible energy management strategies. Considering independent Cloud providers, each one is exclusively bound to the specific energy supplier powering its datacenter. The situation radically changes if we consider a federation of cooperating Cloud providers. In such a context, a proper migration of virtual machines among providers can lead to a global energy sustainability strategy. In this paper, we present a new strategy to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions in federated Cloud ecosystems. More specifically, we propose a solution that allows providers to determine the best green destination where virtual machines should be migrated in order to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of the whole federated environment.