On Data Center Demand Response: A Cloud Federation Approach

The significantly high energy consumption of data centers constitutes a major load on the smart power grid. Data center demand response is a promising solution to incentivize the cloud providers to adapt their consumption to the power grid conditions. These policies not only mitigate the operational stability issues of the smart grid but also potentially decrease the electricity bills of cloud providers. Cloud providers can improve their contribution and reduce their energy cost by collaboratively managing their workload. Through cooperation in the form of cloud federations, providers can spatially migrate their workload to better utilize the benefits provided by demand response schemes over multiple locations. To this end, this work considers an interaction system between the independent cloud providers and the corresponding smart grid utilities in the context of a demand response program. Leveraging the cooperative game theory, this paper presents a federation formation among the cloud providers in the presence of a location-dependent demand response program. A distributed algorithm that is coupled with an optimal workload allocation problem is applied. The effect of the federation's formation on the clouds' profits and on the smart grid performance is analyzed through simulation. Simulation results show that cooperation increases the clouds' profits as well as the smart grid performance compared to the noncooperative case.