Energy-aware Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Cloud Data Centers

With the increasing popularity of cloud computing, its large energy consumption cannot only contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, but also result in the rising of the cost of operating a cloud data centers. Therefore, energy-aware load balancing is increasingly becoming a core and challenging issue in cloud computing. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient load balancing algorithm which takes advantage of both dynamic voltage/frequency scaling and virtual machine consolidation to reduce energy consumed by cloud infrastructures. Our experimental results indicate that, compared to a round robin algorithm for load balancing in cloud computing, the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 35.3% energy saving in heterogeneous cloud data center.