Energy consumption prediction based on time-series models for CPU-intensive activities in the cloud

Due to the increasing energy consumption in cloud data centers, energy saving has become a vital objective in designing the underlying cloud infrastructures. A precise energy consumption model is the foundation of many energy-saving strategies. This paper focuses on exploring the energy consumption of virtual machines running various CPU-intensive activities in the cloud server using two types of models: traditional time-series models, such as ARMA and ES, and time-series segmentation models, such as sliding windows model and bottom-up model. We have built a cloud environment using OpenStack, and conducted extensive experiments to analyze and compare the prediction accuracy of these strategies. The results indicate that the performance of ES model is better than the ARMA model in predicting the energy consumption of known activities. When predicting the energy consumption of unknown activities, sliding windows segmentation model and bottom-up segmentation model can all have satisfactory performance but the former is slightly better than the later.