Energy and carbon-efficient placement of virtual machines in distributed cloud data centers

Due to the increasing use of Cloud computing services and the amount of energy used by data centers, there is a growing interest in reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint of data centers. Cloud data centers use virtualization technology to host multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical server. By applying efficient VM placement algorithms, Cloud providers are able to enhance energy efficiency and reduce carbon footprint. Previous works have focused on reducing the energy used within a single or multiple data centers without considering their energy sources and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). In contrast, this paper proposes a novel VM placement algorithm to increase the environmental sustainability by taking into account distributed data centers with different carbon footprint rates and PUEs. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm reduces the CO2 emission and power consumption, while it maintains the same level of quality of service compared to other competitive algorithms.