Classification of Techniques for Energy Efficient Load Distribution Algorithms in Clouds - A Systematic Literature Review

Cloud Computing has recently become an important driver for IT service provisioning. In addition to its associated benefits for both customers and IT service providers, cloud computing also comes along with new challenges. One of the major challenges for providers is to reduce the energy consumption, since today already more than fifty percent of operational costs in data centers account for energy. A possible way to reduce these costs is to distribute load in terms of virtual machines within the data center. Developing algorithms for this purpose has been a topic of recent research. In order to capture the state of the art of energy efficient load distribution in clouds, this paper presents a structured literature review on load distribution algorithms that aim to reduce the energy consumption in data centers for cloud computing. The algorithms are reviewed in terms of their type, their evaluation method and their potential side effects in terms of drawbacks.