Energy-Aware Server Provisioning and Load Dispatching for Connection-Intensive Internet Services

Energy consumption in hosting Internet services is becoming a pressing issue as these services scale up. Dynamic server provisioning techniques are effective in turning off unnecessary servers to save energy. Such techniques, mostly studied for request-response services, face challenges in the context of connection servers that host a large number of long-lived TCP connections. In this paper, the authors characterize unique properties, performance, and power models of connection servers, based on a real data trace collected from the deployed Windows Live Messenger.