Time of use (ToU)-awareness with inter-data center workload sharing in the cloud backbone

Cloud computing is the leading edge concept which combines the advantages of several existing computing concepts for the betterment of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) business. This new business model aims at moving the services such as software, platform and/or infrastructure to a shared pool of resources which are mainly housed in the data centers. In this paper, we propose a novel virtualization scheme for the cloud network with the objective of provisioning the demands among the data centers in a Time-Of-Use (ToU) pricing-aware manner while ensuring maximum energy savings in the cloud network throughout the day. In addition to the unicast demands between backbone nodes, upstream user demand destined to data centers, and downstream data center demands originating from many data centers, here, we also consider inter-data center traffic in order to enable workload sharing between the data centers. Through numerical results, we show that significant savings in terms of operational expenditures (Opex) can be achieved while demands can be provisioned with less energy consumption in the data centers and network equipments. Furthermore, we show that incorporation of inter-data center workload sharing in ToU-aware provisioning can mitigate the increased propagation delay introduced to the user demands submitted to the cloud.