Software Techniques for Making Cloud Data Centers Energy-efficient: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

Due to high demand, many cloud data centers have been developed across the world, consuming a large amount of energy. Making cloud datacenters energy efficient has become essential. Energy consumption of data centers can be minimized by designing energy-efficient hardware, software, and infrastructure. In this paper, we aim at giving an overview of software techniques, affected stakeholders, performance features, datasets, and tools used to make cloud data centers energy-efficient. To achieve this goal, we conducted a systematic mapping study using five online databases. After applying inclusion/exclusion and quality criteria, we selected 58 publications for further analysis. Our results indicate that all publications are solution and validation type of publications. We did not find publications containing evaluations in industry. We found that workload scheduling is the most frequently proposed technique used to improve cloud datacenters' energy efficiency. We found that not considering violations of service level agreements mostly affects end-users of cloud data centers. When analyzing how suggested solutions are validated, we identified the need to develop a standardized set of performance measures to benchmark software techniques proposed to make cloud data centers greener.