Optical inter-data-center network design under resilience requirements and dynamic electricity pricing

Workloads submitted to the Cloud are handled within the data centers in a distributed manner. Reducing the operational expenses is a fundamental concern for the operators which can be addressed by efficient design of the inter-data-center network. Optical networks have been reported to be the best transport media to accommodate the high capacity inter-data-center traffic. Furthermore, employment of elastic optical networks can further improve bandwidth utilization over the backbone. In this paper, we present our solution to minimize the operational expenses of the operators through resilient design of an inter-data-center network in the presence of dynamic electricity pricing, namely Time-of-Use tariffs. The proposed solution periodically virtualizes the inter-data-center network topology based on previously forecasted demand intensities with the joint objective of minimum outage probability and minimized electric bill for the data center and network operators. Through simulations, we compare our solution to a naïve resilient design solution and another design approach aiming at minimum energy consumption. We discuss the benefits of our proposal in terms of both objectives and provide insights towards challenges and opportunities in this field.