GreenCloudTax: A Flexible IaaS Tax Approach as Stimulus for Green Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is underpinned by huge datacenters which are considered as significant consumers of energy. Under the umbrella term GreenCloud the scientific community developed different architectures, algorithms and methods to improve energy efficiency of these datacenters. However, approaches which try to modify existing or applying new economical concepts to improve energy efficiency of datacenters are rare. In this paper we propose the GreenCloudTax model which is a flexible IaaS tax system for calculating taxes of virtual machines by using the energy efficiency of the underlying server infrastructure. Thereby, providers relying on energy efficient servers can sell their virtual machines with lower taxes than those with energy inefficient servers. This results in a competitive advantage and consequently leads to reduced energy consumption in total too. We analyzed the effects of our GreenCloudTax model on Cloud markets by a simulation environment which is based on CloudSim's Bazaar-Extension.