A model for estimating energy consumption based on resources utilization

Over the recent years, managing the energy efficiency of ICT resources, mainly in data centers, has become a priority. Energy efficiency improvement involves numerous ICT initiatives, from the development of more efficient devices, to virtualization and resource consolidation. However, the management of energy efficiency requires dynamic information on the energy consumption, as well as a thorough understanding on how the utilization of computing resources influences energy consumption. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a computationally inexpensive method that indirectly measures energy consumption with a good accuracy. Our model estimates the dynamic energy consumption (given as the amount of watts consumed at a given time), based on information about the utilization of computing resources coming from the OS (e.g., memory, processors, I/O operations, etc). Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an accuracy of 85.23% and an average random error of 8.6 watts compared to a power meter. Our studies also show which resources have the most impact on energy consumption. Our model can be easily implemented in software, and deployed in data center machines for energy management.