A market-oriented incentive mechanism for emergency demand response in colocation data centers

Rapidly developing colocation data centers (or colocations, for short) have become important participants in emergency demand response (EDR) programs. Different from traditional data centers, in colocations, tenants control their own servers; thus, they may not coordinate to reduce their power consumption. In this paper, to encourage tenants to join EDR programs, we propose a market-oriented incentive mechanism, MicDR, which can effectively reduce energy costs. MicDR includes a local incentive mechanism (LiMec), a global incentive mechanism (GiMec) and a server-sharing incentive mechanism (SiMec). LiMec motivates tenants to improve their energy efficiency locally. GiMec encourages tenants to improve their energy efficiency by requesting public server resources. To support the requests sparked by GiMec, SiMec encourages tenants to share idle server resources. A (1 + ϵ)-approximation algorithm is proposed to achieve an asymptotic optimal energy-saving scheme. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated, and trace-driven simulations verify the effectiveness and feasibility of MicDR.