Hybrid Power Control and Electricity Cost Management for Distributed Internet Data Centers in Cloud Computing

Along with the increasing Internet services and cloud computing in recent years, more and more data and computation are migrated to or hosted on the Internet data centers (IDCs). Meanwhile, the energy consumed by IDCs has been skyrocketing. Such mass power consumption has brought extremely heavy burden on cloud providers. While most of the previous work focuses on reducing energy consumption, this paper addresses the electricity cost minimization problem. Since the electricity prices exhibit time and location diversities in many countries, we can take the advantage of these diversities to save on operation cost. Further, we exploit server-level power control scheme to effective reduce the power consumption. We formulate the total cost minimization as a non-linear optimization problem. Then we design a heuristic algorithm to efficiently solve the problem. Extensive evaluations show that our algorithm can obviously reduce the electricity cost.