The Expected Impact of Smart Devices Virtualization

摘要

Overcoming the typical ossification of the traditional TCP/IP-based Internet infrastructure will allow opening the way for more flexible and energy efficient paradigms, able to provide a sustainable support to the constantly increasing number of devices and services. To this goal, the INPUT Project will overcome current limitations by introducing computing and storage capabilities to edge network devices in order to allow users/telecom operators to create/manage private clouds "in the network". In addition, these new capabilities will allow replacing smart devices, such as network-attached storage servers, set-top-boxes, video sensors etc. with their virtual images. Although this virtualization process can clearly bring to a reduction of the emissions, along with the lowering of capital (CAPEX) and operational (OPEX) expenditures, on the other hand it requires more computational capacity at server level, which may erase the savings produced by virtualization in the absence of a thorough management and planning. In this respect, this paper presents a mathematical model that analyzes the impact of different levels of virtualization on the overall energy efficiency by thoroughly outlining how the carbon footprint varies depending on the virtualization level of a device.