Towards Energy-Aware Placement of Real-Time Virtual Machines in the Cloud

Cloud computing is an evolving paradigm which is becoming an adoptable technology for a variety of applications. However, cloud infrastructures must be able to fulfill application requirements before adopting cloud solutions. Cloud infrastructure providers communicate the characteristics of their services to their customers through Service Level Agreements (SLA). In order for a real-time application to be able to use cloud technology, cloud infrastructure providers have to be able to provide timing guarantees in the SLAs. In this paper, we propose a cloud solution in which periodic tasks are provided as a service in the Software as a Service (SaS) model. Tasks belonging to a certain application are mapped in a Virtual Machine (VM). We also study the problem of VM placement on a cloud infrastructure. We propose a placement mechanism which minimizes the energy consumption of the data center by consolidating VMs in a minimum number of servers while respecting the timing requirement of virtual machines.