Virtual Network Embedding Employing Renewable Energy Sources

Environmental sustainability in high capacity networks and cloud data centers has become one of the hottest research subjects. In this paper, we investigate the effective use of renewable energy and hence resource allocation in core networks with clouds as a means of reducing the carbon footprint. We develop a Green Virtual Network Embedding (GVNE) framework for minimizing the use of non-renewable energy through intelligent provisioning of bandwidth and cloud data center resources. The problem is modeled as a mixed integer linear program (MILP). The results show that it is better to instantiate virtual machines in cloud data centers that have access to abundant renewable energy even at the expense of traversing several links across the network. The GVNE model reduces the overall CO2 emissions by up to 32% for the network considering solar power availability and data center locations.