Migration-Driven Energy Consumption Optimisation Atop Cloud Continuum
The Cloud Continuum (CC) concept is to integrate private and public Far-Edge, Edge, and Central Cloud resources and provide uniform access to them for resource customers. The CC idea, by integrating all computing resources into a single domain, improves resource utilisation efficiency and simplifies the placement or migration of Virtual Functions (VFs). The paper focuses on the use of VFs' migration to optimise energy consumption in networks built atop CC. For this purpose, we adopt the CC-based 6G-Cloud project reference architecture, implemented using Kubernetes and cloud-native open-source tools (such as Karmada), as a platform for evaluating different algorithms aimed at optimising energy consumption. The work demonstrates key mechanisms for implementing the Energy Efficiency (EE) use case, showing benefits even with simple optimisation algorithms. Moreover, it highlights both the simplicity of the operational workflows and the resulting energy savings, while revealing important aspects of the EE problem in virtualised environments.