Sustainability modelling and green energy optimisation in microgrid powered distributed FogMicroDataCenters in rural area

• Published in: Wireless networks Vol. 27; no. 8; pp. 5519 - 5532
• Main Authors: Padma Priya R, Rekha, D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01-11-2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Alternative energy; Clean energy; Clean technology; Cloud computing; Communications Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Data centers; Distributed generation; Economic models; Electrical Engineering; Electrification; Energy; Energy sources; Engineering; IT in Business; Meteorological data; Modelling; Networks; Optimization; Power consumption; Renewable energy; Resource utilization; Rural areas; Software-defined networking; Virtual environments; Wind turbines; Wireless networks; Fog computing; Green Data Centers; Software Defined Networking (SDN); MicroGrid optimal sizing
• ISSN: 1022-0038; 1572-8196
• DOI: 10.1007/s11276-019-02207-z

Government now-a-days are looking forward to achieve “Energy for All” standards. Countries are committing themselves to reduce carbon emissions. Recently, every IT industry giants, who typically own and operate huge Data Centers (DC) are looking forward to achieve “100% usage of green energy to power their datacenters, contribute to the utility grid in equivalence to their electrical power consumptions”. Electrification and gradual decarbonisation still continue as significant, global concern. Hence it is pretty clear that need for MicroGrid (MG) based facilities is actually a mandatory. But intermittent-characteristic (unreliability/unavailability) of Renewable-Energy (RE) generating sources (like Solar Panels, Wind Turbines) regularly hinder both the stake holders-Government and IT industry from accomplishing such social and economic initiatives. Hence SmartMicroGrid (SMG) connected with utility grid are envisioned to support powering industries inorder to avoid future power outages. Interconnected industry4.0 factories where, actually the smart-management interms of two-way power supply and two-way communication network is foreseen. They are highly dependent on modern, integrated, Information and Communication technologies (IoT sensors, Fog and Cloud computing etc.). In this paper we have focussed on two objectives. Firstly our objective is to identify, optimum renewable-generation-capacities inorder to minimise investment cost of a microgrid. Secondly our objective is to maximize usage of more clean energy for applications running on FogMicroDataCenter (fogMDC), powered by microgrids and controlled by Sofware Defined Networking (SDN). We have used realistic meteorological data of Tamil nadu, India for our proposed work. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work proposed for two different scenarios, performance modelling and economic modelling aiding MG powered FogMDCs. Proposed economic modelling work is related to finding, the optimum sizing of distributed energy resources and financial cost. Proposed performance modelling is about, the clean energy usages in micro grid powered fogMDC for operations, supported by SDN for efficient distributed Virtual Machine (VM) based resource utilization to guarantee QoS in time sensitive IoT applications.