Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 18, numbers 1 and 2, 2025 // View article
Authors:
Etienne-Victor Depasquale
Saviour Zammit
Keywords: containers; power; video; streaming; implementation model; tickless kernel; PowerTOP; power instrumentation.
Abstract:
Containerization of a service enables live migration and, thereby, consolidation of running service instances onto as few host platforms as possible. However, containerization’s operational overhead must be investigated to determine overall viability. One dimension of this overhead is that of power use, and this is investigated here. An architecture for a video cache service at the edge of a Communications Service Provider’s (CSP) network in the metropolitan area is designed, and a scaled version is implemented in a laboratory environment. A comparison is made between power used while streaming videos in both native and containerized modes of operation. Containerization is found to incur a low power overhead while streaming video, compared with streaming video from ffmpeg running directly on the host operating system. Moreover, notwithstanding advances with tickless kernels, the kernel’s scheduling timer routine remains a dominant power consumer. Power use is measured using hardware instrumentation and with PowerTOP, a software power meter. Limits on the latter’s accuracy have been observed
Pages: 46 to 63
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2025. Used with permission.
Publication date: June 30, 2025
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-261x