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IEEE SustainIT 2015
Computer Communications 96 (2016) 62
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Computer Communications journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comcom
Editorial
Special Section on Selected Papers from IFIP/IEEE SustainIT 2015
It is our great pleasure to introduce this special section of the Journal, collecting extended papers from the 4th IFIP/IEEE Conference on Sustainable Internet and ICT for Sustainability, SustainIT 2015. The proliferation of information and communication technology (ICT) represents a unique opportunity to achieve a sustainable future. It can help reduce the society’s carbon footprint, capture and mitigate effects of climate change, and support the management of civic infrastructures. ICT is continually being integrated into more and more areas of our daily lives, such as into the management and energy-awareness of data center operations and smart energy distribution networks. However, this evolution of ICT is accompanied by its own challenges, predominantly the resultant increased carbon footprint and the accelerated obsolescence of electronic equipment. These twin problems of exploiting ICT for a more sustainable world while reducing the environmental impact of ICT represent the underlying theme for this special section. Papers in this special section have been carefully selected from the conference program of IFIP/IEEE SustainIT 2015, and extended versions of four manuscripts have been included, including the awardee of the best paper award. This diverse paper selection addresses sustainability issues in different scenarios, including data centers, wireless computer networking, and electrical power grids. The paper “Multi-Agent Collaboration for Conflict Management in Residential Demand Response” (by F. Golpayegani, I. Dusparic, A. Taylor and S. Clarke) addresses the important issue of scheduling charging patterns of electric vehicles with the goals of including smoothing demand while providing enough battery charge for each electric vehicle. A decentralized approach based on collaborative parallel Monte Carlo Tree search is proposed and analyzed by means of simulation, and proved to be scalable and fair in charge distribution. The paper “Smart Grid-aware Scheduling in Data Centres” (by M. Mäsker, L. Nagel, A. Brinkmann, F. Lotfifar and M. Johnson) investigates how data centers can benefit from variable energy prices in smart grids. Two scheduling strategies for minimizing energy costs are proposed and compared. The first approach exclusively relies on current smart meter readings to schedule jobs, while the second approach also estimates the future energy price based on weather forecasts. Experiments and a supplementary cost analysis show that the simple-to-apply low-cost strategies proposed in the paper lead to a high utilization of renewable sources and cost savings close to the optimum.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2016.11.003 0140-3664/© 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.
The paper “Empirical Comparison of Power-efficient Virtual Machine Assignment Algorithms” (by J. Arjona Aroca and A. Fernández Anta) focuses on energy consumption of different virtual machine assignments and distributions in large scale scenarios, assuming that the physical machines have a power consumption that increases super-linearly with the load. Two novel task assignment strategies are proposed and their superior performance in comparison to the state-of-the-art is discussed in depth for several representative scenarios. Finally, in the paper “Optimal configuration of a Resource-onDemand 802.11 WLAN with Non-Zero Start-Up Times” (by J. Ortín, P. Serrano and C. Donato) the authors present an analytical model for Resource-on-Demand schemes in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks that takes into account non-zero start up times of access points. Authors derive key performance metrics for the system, such as average power consumption, blocking probability, average delays, and provide a thorough validation of the analytical results using a discrete event simulator. Based on an extensive trade-off analysis they propose an exhaustive-search algorithm to configure the system with optimal parameters of the model, according to a userdefined performance metric. To conclude, we believe that bringing research from these domains together is crucial to establish new avenues in the domain of sustainability. We would like to express our gratitude to all authors for their high quality contributions, and to all reviewers for their invaluable work and responsiveness under tight deadlines. Enjoy your reading! Guest Editors Enzo Mingozzi University of Pisa, Italy Andreas Reinhardt Technische Universität Clausthal, Germany E-mail addresses: [email protected] (E. Mingozzi), [email protected] (A. Reinhardt)
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Computer Communications journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comcom
Editorial
Special Section on Selected Papers from IFIP/IEEE SustainIT 2015
It is our great pleasure to introduce this special section of the Journal, collecting extended papers from the 4th IFIP/IEEE Conference on Sustainable Internet and ICT for Sustainability, SustainIT 2015. The proliferation of information and communication technology (ICT) represents a unique opportunity to achieve a sustainable future. It can help reduce the society’s carbon footprint, capture and mitigate effects of climate change, and support the management of civic infrastructures. ICT is continually being integrated into more and more areas of our daily lives, such as into the management and energy-awareness of data center operations and smart energy distribution networks. However, this evolution of ICT is accompanied by its own challenges, predominantly the resultant increased carbon footprint and the accelerated obsolescence of electronic equipment. These twin problems of exploiting ICT for a more sustainable world while reducing the environmental impact of ICT represent the underlying theme for this special section. Papers in this special section have been carefully selected from the conference program of IFIP/IEEE SustainIT 2015, and extended versions of four manuscripts have been included, including the awardee of the best paper award. This diverse paper selection addresses sustainability issues in different scenarios, including data centers, wireless computer networking, and electrical power grids. The paper “Multi-Agent Collaboration for Conflict Management in Residential Demand Response” (by F. Golpayegani, I. Dusparic, A. Taylor and S. Clarke) addresses the important issue of scheduling charging patterns of electric vehicles with the goals of including smoothing demand while providing enough battery charge for each electric vehicle. A decentralized approach based on collaborative parallel Monte Carlo Tree search is proposed and analyzed by means of simulation, and proved to be scalable and fair in charge distribution. The paper “Smart Grid-aware Scheduling in Data Centres” (by M. Mäsker, L. Nagel, A. Brinkmann, F. Lotfifar and M. Johnson) investigates how data centers can benefit from variable energy prices in smart grids. Two scheduling strategies for minimizing energy costs are proposed and compared. The first approach exclusively relies on current smart meter readings to schedule jobs, while the second approach also estimates the future energy price based on weather forecasts. Experiments and a supplementary cost analysis show that the simple-to-apply low-cost strategies proposed in the paper lead to a high utilization of renewable sources and cost savings close to the optimum.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2016.11.003 0140-3664/© 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.
The paper “Empirical Comparison of Power-efficient Virtual Machine Assignment Algorithms” (by J. Arjona Aroca and A. Fernández Anta) focuses on energy consumption of different virtual machine assignments and distributions in large scale scenarios, assuming that the physical machines have a power consumption that increases super-linearly with the load. Two novel task assignment strategies are proposed and their superior performance in comparison to the state-of-the-art is discussed in depth for several representative scenarios. Finally, in the paper “Optimal configuration of a Resource-onDemand 802.11 WLAN with Non-Zero Start-Up Times” (by J. Ortín, P. Serrano and C. Donato) the authors present an analytical model for Resource-on-Demand schemes in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks that takes into account non-zero start up times of access points. Authors derive key performance metrics for the system, such as average power consumption, blocking probability, average delays, and provide a thorough validation of the analytical results using a discrete event simulator. Based on an extensive trade-off analysis they propose an exhaustive-search algorithm to configure the system with optimal parameters of the model, according to a userdefined performance metric. To conclude, we believe that bringing research from these domains together is crucial to establish new avenues in the domain of sustainability. We would like to express our gratitude to all authors for their high quality contributions, and to all reviewers for their invaluable work and responsiveness under tight deadlines. Enjoy your reading! Guest Editors Enzo Mingozzi University of Pisa, Italy Andreas Reinhardt Technische Universität Clausthal, Germany E-mail addresses: [email protected] (E. Mingozzi), [email protected] (A. Reinhardt)