Electricity Cost Management for Cloud Data Centers under Diverse Delay Constraints

Large-scale Internet applications provide service to end users with servers, which may be located at geographically distributed data centers. Users may require different delay constraints for different services. To meet the service delay requirements to end users, the data centers must provide enough server resources which incur a large amount of electricity and dollars cost. In this paper, we tackle the problem of minimizing electricity cost under diverse delay requirements of different services for different users in a multi-electricity-market environment. We propose two algorithms to reduce the electricity cost, taking into account the location diversity and the time diversity of electricity price. Our simulation results demonstrated that the proposed algorithms were effective in terms of the reduction of the electricity cost while satisfying the diverse delay constraints.