An energy consumption model for virtualized office environments

The increasing cost of energy and the worldwide desire to reduce CO2 emissions has raised concern about the energy efficiency of information and communication technology. Whilst research has focused on data centres recently, this paper identifies office environments as significant consumers of energy. Office environments offer a great potential of energy savings, given that office hosts often remain turned on 24 hours per day while being underutilised or even idle. This paper describes a virtualized office environment that virtulizes office resources to achieve an energy-based resource management. The resource management stops idle hosts from consuming resources and consolidates utilised services on office hosts. Particularly, this paper develops an energy consumption model that is able to estimate the energy consumption of hosts and network within virtualized and ordinary office environments. The model is used to prove the energy efficiency of the suggested approach analytically and to evaluate it using a discrete-event simulation.