Modelling energy consumption of network transfers and virtual machine migration.

Reducing energy consumption has become a key issue for data centres, not only because of economical benefits but also for environmental and marketing reasons. Therefore, assessing their energy consumption requires precise models. In the past years, many models targeting different hardware components, such as CPU, storage and network interface cards (NIC) have been proposed. However, most of them neglect energy consumption related to VM migration. Since VM migration is a network-intensive process, to accurately model its energy consumption we also need energy models for network transfers, comprising their complete software stacks with different energy characteristics.