A Technique to Identify Data Exchange Between Cloud Virtual Machines

Modern cloud data centers typically exploit management strategies to reduce the overall energy consumption. While most of the solutions focus on the energy consumption due to computational elements, the optimization of network-related aspects of a data center is becoming more and more important, considering also the advent of the Software-Defined Network paradigm. However, an enabling step to implement network-aware Virtual Machine (VM) allocation is the knowledge of data exchange patterns. In this way we can place in well-connected hosts (or on the same physical host) the couples of VMs that exchange a large amount of information. Unfortunately, in Infrastructure as a Service data centers, a detailed knowledge on VMs data exchange is seldom available without the deployment of a specialized (and costly) monitoring infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a technique to infer VMs communication patterns starting from input/output network traffic time series of each VM. We discuss both the theoretical aspect of such technique and the design challenges for its implementation. A case study is used to demonstrate the viability of our idea.