Energy efficiency is one of the most important design considerations for a cloud data center. Recent approaches to the energy-efficient resource management for data centers usually model the problem as a bin packing problem with the goal of minimizing the number of physical machines (PMs) employed. However, minimizing the number of PMs may not necessarily minimize the energy consumption in a heterogeneous cloud environment. To address the problem, this paper models the resource allocation problem in a heterogeneous cloud data center as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). By solving this constraint satisfaction problem, an optimal resource allocation scheme, which includes a virtual machine provision algorithm and a virtual machine packing algorithm, is designed to minimize the energy consumption in a virtualized heterogeneous cloud data center. Performance studies show that this proposed new scheme outperforms the existing bin-packing based approaches in terms of energy consumption in heterogeneous cloud data centers.
Resource Allocation in Networks Using Abstraction and Constraint Satisfaction Techniques