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Abstract. As one of the first worldwide initiatives provisioning ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) services entirely based on renewable energy such as solar, wind and hydroelectricity across Canada and around the world, the GreenStar Network (GSN) is developed to dynamically transport user services to be processed in data centers built in proximity to green energy sources, reducing GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions of ICT equipments. Regarding the current approach, which focuses mainly in reducing energy consumption at the micro-level through energy efficiency improvements, the overall energy consumption will eventually increase due to the growing demand from new services and users, resulting in an increase in GHG emissions. Based on the cooperation between Mantychore FP7 and the GSN, our approach is, therefore, much broader and more appropriate because it focuses on GHG emission reductions at the macro-level. Whilst energy efficiency techniques are still encouraged at low-end client equipments, the heaviest computing services are dedicated to virtual data centers powered completely by green energy from a large abundant reserve of natural resources, particularly in northern countries.

Cloud computing is a new model of consuming and delivering IT and infrastructure resources. It enables users to obtain what they need, as they need it, from advanced applications to IT infrastructure and platform services, including virtual infrastructure, servers and storage. It can provide significant economies of scale and greater business agility, while accelerating the pace of innovation. Network virtualization, as a key enabling technology in resource provisioning for cloud, has attracted extensive attention from both academia and industry. It takes cloud services to the next level by delivering optimised resources, on-demand utilisation, flexibility and scalability. This paper proposes a novel architectural solution for future cloud service providers based on the concept of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) framework and IP network virtualization. A number of associated schemes have also been designed as building blocks for the proposed framework, including resource description and abstraction mechanisms, virtual network request method and a resource broker mechanism named Marketplace. The proposed framework is able to respond quickly to the infrastructure needs for those cloud services with dynamic resizing of the infrastructure by aggregation or partition to meet capacity requirements of services. At the same time, it improves the utilisation of providers' resources with the creation of an infrastructure incorporating the heterogeneous resources in the data centre. In addition, the proposed marketplace, which also allows the trading of IP network resources between infrastructure providers and cloud service providers, is an important and complementary innovation within the cloud landscape.