Energy Conservation in Multi-Tenant Networks through Power Virtualization

In the service-centric Internet, multiple virtual services (tenants) are overlayed on top of the same infrastructure (both in wide-area networks and in datacenter networks). We propose conserving energy, in this setting, by virtualizing network power consumed by each tenant, feeding back that information to the tenant, and incentivizing the tenant to conserve energy by making their bill proportional to this virtual power. However, virtualizing power in these multitenant networks is tricky since the network is not energyproportional, i.e., the energy consumption and its monetary expenditure do not reduce with a decrease in load per component. We overcome this limitation by proposing a simple heuristic for billing, that further motivates tenants to align their workload in a manner conducive to optimization by the infrastructure provider.