Improving Quality of Service and Reducing Power Consumption with WAN accelerator in Cloud Computing Environments

Abstract

The widespread use of cloud computing services is expected to deteriorate a Quality of Service and toincrease the power consumption of ICT devices, since the distance to a server becomes longer than before. Migration of virtual machines over a wide area can solve many problems such as load balancing and power saving in cloud computing environments. This paper proposes to dynamically apply WAN accelerator within the network when a virtual machine is moved to a distant center, in order to prevent the degradation in performance after live migration of virtual machines over a wide area. mSCTP-based data transfer using different TCP connections before and after migration is proposed in order to use a currently available WAN accelerator. This paper does not consider the performance degradation of live migration itself. Then, this paper proposes to reduce the power consumption of ICT devices, which consists of installing WAN accelerators as part of cloud resources actively and increasing the packet transfer rate of communication link temporarily. It is demonstrated that the power consumption with WAN accelerator could be reduced to one-tenth of that without WAN accelerator.