An Energy Saving-Oriented Incentive Mechanism in Colocation Data Centers

The size and amount of colocation data centers (colocations, for short) have been growing rapidly with the increasing popularity of cloud services, which ultimately causes a heavy burden on the power grid and the environment. However, even a colocation owner wishes to reduce its energy consumption, it may not be able to apply some effective energy saving techniques directly to the servers, since the servers belong to and are operated by its tenants. To solve the "uncoordinated relationship" issue between owners and tenants and achieve the energy reduction with a limited cost budget, an energy saving-oriented incentive mechanism, ESCo is proposed in this paper. Different from existing mechanisms that emphasize on minimizing the cost for the owners, our mechanism emphasizes on the maximization of the amount of energy saved by the tenants given a limited budget that the owner wants to pay for the energy saving. An algorithm is developed to realize a stable assignment in the mechanism. Trace-driven simulations based on real-world data are performed to verify the effectiveness of ESCo. The results show that ESCo can achieve 14.47% more energy saving than existing colocation incentive mechanisms.