Energy-Efficient Service Delivery
In a nutshell
This project is developing schemes that minimise the energy consumption of distributed service delivery platforms which are based on devices at the end-user's premises, such as home gateways or set-top-boxes. This research is relevant to the increasing regulatory and economic concerns on energy cost and environmental footprint of Internet services. Moreover, this research is done in the context of the NanoDatacenter project (funded by the European Union's 7th Framework Programme, EU FP7), to which NICTA participates.
BackgroundLarge-scale service and content distribution is a key challenge for the future Internet. Historically, content distribution in the Internet has relied on a client-server model. More recent industry solutions are based on distributed schemes optimizing resources such as bandwidth or delay (e.g. Akamai). NaDa (Nanodatacenters) proposes a new content hosting and distribution paradigm based on a distributed edge infrastructure, which consists of devices at user-premises, such as home gateways or TV set-top-boxes. As illustrated by the ever increasing part of consumer electronics in national electricity usage (about 11% of U.S. residential electricity in 2006), we can no longer ignore energy considerations in large service deployments. In this context, our group is developing new algorithms to deploy and deliver "cloud services" on this distributed infrastructure, with the primary focus of minimising the global energy consumption. What will this research achieve?This project will develop schemes that minimise energy cost of a distributed service delivery platform based on a managed overlay of distributed devices such as home gateways or set-top boxes. These schemes will allow to aggressively shutdown (i.e. stand-by mode) individual devices when not in use by their owners, while maintaining overall service level objectives. The main directions which will be investigated to design these schemes are classical multi-constraint optimization, hypergraph based optimisation, and intelligent content prediction and placement. |  Energy-efficient Service Delivery Overview |
Who will benefit?
Operators of service delivery platforms (e.g. Video-On-Demand providers, ISPs, TV companies) will use the proposed enery-aware content distribution schemes to lower their operational costs and meet energy-related regulatory policies on access devices (e.g. home gateway, set-top-box).
Key features
- Support for multiple type of services (e.g. IP-TV, VoD, multiplayer online gaming)
- Secure and managed peer-to-peer approach
- Optimise distributed service delivery in terms of energy consumption
Progress update
- January 2011 - Work in progress on the development of a second optimisation method based on hypergraph models
- December 2010 - Work in progress on the development of a technical report/paper to report on the complete evaluation of the proposed multi-constraint optimisation model in a static small-scale environment (e.g. "neighbourhood" size of 10k peers).
- May 2010 - Publication of a paper describing modifications to the Bit-Torrent protocol which allows a more efficient use of the upload capacity of peers in the context of on-demand content streaming, without impacting on other Bit-Torrent desirable properties.
- February 2010 - Publication of a paper describing the proposed model for the multi-constraint optimisation approach for energy-efficient service delivery. This report also presents some initial results on this optimisation.
- March 2009 - Report on the evaluation of potential energy saving with the proposed distributed delivery approach compared to traditional datacentre approach, and a review of relevant regulatory policies.
Publications
“Toward Efficient On-demand Streaming with BitTorrent”
Y. Borghol, S. Ardon, A. Mahanti, and N. Carlsson
9th IFIP Networking Conference, Chennai, India, May 2010
“High performance peer to peer distributed computing with application to numerical simulation”
The Tung Nguyen, Didier El Baz, Pierre Spitéri, Guillaume Jourjon, Minh Chau
7th International Workshop on Hot Topics in Peer to Peer Systems, in conjunction with IPDCS 2010, Atlanta, USA, April 2010
“Models for an Energy-Efficient P2P Delivery Service”
G. Jourjon, T. Rakotoarivelo, and M. Ott
18th International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-based Computing (PDP 2010), Pisa, Italy, February 2010
More information
You can view a short presentation on our Energy-aware Service Delivery activity here:
Linkage and Collaboration
Through this research, NICTA is a partner in the NanoDatacenters (NADA) EU FP7 funded projects. NADA is a CP-FP project involving 9 partners (e.g. Thomson, Telefonica) for a duration of 36 months with an approved budget of 4.9M Euro. It proposes a radical and innovative solution to data hosting and delivery for the future Internet. This project was selected for funding in a round with an approximate acceptance rate of 15%.