Battery-Assisted Online Operation of Distributed Data Centers With Uncertain Workload and Electricity Prices

This article investigates the online operation of distributed data centers equipped with energy battery. We aim to minimize their long-term operational cost by optimally distributing workload among data centers and operating energy battery. However, future spatio-temporally variant uncertainties in both workload and electricity prices have been the main impediment for a performance-guaranteed online data center operation strategy. To address this issue, we develop a fully distributed online algorithm that decouples workload distribution and battery operation across the network and time by introducing well-designed virtual queues for workload and batteries into the framework of Lyapunov optimization. Theoretically, an analytical gap between the long-term operational cost achieved by our algorithm and the theoretical optimum is provided to corroborate the desirable operation strategy. Extensive simulations using the real-world workload and electricity price data demonstrate the cost-delay tradeoff that our algorithm strikes and validate the theoretical results that we obtained.