Studying the energy consumption of data transfers in Clouds: the Ecofen approach

Energy consumption is one of the main limiting factors for designing large scale Clouds. Evaluating the energy consumption of Clouds networking architectures and providing multi-level views required by providers and users, is a challenging issue. In this paper, we show how to evaluate and understand network choices (protocols, topologies) in terms of contributions to the energy consumption of the global Cloud infrastructures. By applying the ECOFEN model (Energy Consumption mOdel For End-to-end Networks) and the corresponding simulation framework, we profile and analyze the energy consumption of data transfers in Clouds.