Models for an Energy-Efficient P2P Delivery Service

Data and service delivery have been historically based on a ´´network centric´´ model, with datacentres being the focal sources. The amount of energy consumed by these datacentres has become an emerging issue for the companies operating them. Thus, many contributions have proposed solutions to improve the energy efficiency of current datacentre architecture and deployments. A recently proposed approach argues for removing the datacentres from the delivery architecture. Their functionalities will instead be distributed at the edge of the network, directly within operator-managed home devices, such as Home Gateways, or Set-Top-Box (STB). This paper presents a study of the overall energy consumption required by such a community of STBs in order to provide the same services as datacentres. This paper also investigates a possible distributed algorithm to further reduce this overall energy consumption. This algorithm will be deployed over a managed peer-to-peer network of STBs. It will make optimized decisions and instruct unused STBs to switch Off to save energy without altering the general Service Level Agreement. We demonstrate the potential benefit of such an algorithm through an off-line scheduling. Finally, we propose a service-delivery model that allows us to integrate the service availability in the energy optimization problem. The combination of these two models is the first step in the development of our energy optimisation distributed algorithm.