Coordinated Energy Cost Management of Distributed Internet Data Centers in Smart Grid

This paper addresses the problem of electricity cost management for Internet service providers with a collection of spatially distributed data centers. As the demand on Internet services drastically increases in recent years, the electricity consumed by Internet data centers (IDCs) has been skyrocketing. While most existing research focuses on reducing electric energy consumption of IDCs at one specific location, the problem of reducing the total electricity cost has been overlooked. This is an important problem faced by service providers, especially in the present multi-electricity-market environment, where the price of electricity may exhibit temporal and spatial diversities. Further, for these service providers, guaranteeing the quality of service (i.e., service level objectives) such as service delay guarantees to the end users is of critical importance. This paper studies the problem of minimizing the total electricity cost under multiple electricity markets environment while guaranteeing the quality of service geared to the location diversity and time diversity of electricity price. The problem is modeled as a constrained mixed-integer programming and an efficient solution algorithm is proposed. Extensive evaluations based on real-world electricity price data for multiple IDC locations illustrate the efficiency and efficacy of our approach.