How Geo-Distributed Data Centers Do Demand Response: A Game-Theoretic Approach

Abstract—We study the demand response (DR) of geodistributed data centers (DCs) using smart grid’s pricing signals set by local electric utilities. The geo-distributed DCs are suitable candidates for the DR programs due to their huge energy consumption and flexibility to distribute their energy demand across time and location, whereas the price signal is well-known for DR programs to reduce the peak-to-average load ratio. There are two dependencies that make the pricing design difficult: 1) dependency among utilities; and 2) dependency between DCs and their local utilities. Our proposed pricing scheme is constructed based on a two-stage Stackelberg game in which each utility sets a real-time price to maximize its own profit in Stage I and based on these prices, the DCs’ service provider minimizes its cost via workload shifting and dynamic server allocation in Stage II. For the first dependency, we show that there exists a unique Nash equilibrium. For the second dependency, we...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: TSG
• Authors: Nguyen H. Tran, Dai Hoang Tran, Shaolei Ren, Zhu Han, Eui-Nam Huh, Choong Seon Hong
• Keywords: TSG 2016