Stackelberg Game for Energy-Aware Resource Allocation to Sustain Data Centers Using RES

Smart Grid (SG) has emerged as one of the most powerful technologies of the modern era for an efficient energy management by integrating information and communication technologies (ICT) in the existing infrastructure. Among various ICT, cloud computing (CC) has emerged as one of the leading service providers which uses geo-distributed data centers (DCs) to serve the requests of users in SG. In recent times, with an increase in service requests by end users for various resources, there has been an exponential increase in the number of servers deployed at various DCs. With an increase in the size, the energy consumption of DCs has increased many folds which leads to an increase in overall operational cost of DCs. However, efficient resource allocation among these geo-distributed DCs may play a vital role in reducing the energy consumption of DCs. Moreover, with an increase in harmful emissions, the use of renewable energy sources (RES) can benefit DCs, SG, and society at large. Keeping focus on these points, in this paper, an energy-aware resource allocation scheme is proposed using a Stackelberg game for energy management in cloud-based DCs. For this purpose, a cloud controller is used to receive the requests of users which then distributes these requests among geo-distributed DCs in such a way that the energy consumption of DCs is sustained by RES. However, if energy consumption of DCs is not sustained by RES then the energy is drawn from the grid. The requests of users are routed to the DC which is offered lowest energy tariff from the grid. For this purpose, a Stackelberg game for energy trading is also proposed to select the grid offering lowest energy tariff to DCs. The proposed scheme is evaluated using various performance metrics using Google workload traces. The results obtained show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.