Incentivizing Users of Data Centers Participate in The Demand Response Programs via Time-Varying Monetary Rewards

Demand response is widely employed by today's data centers to reduce energy consumption in response to the increasing of electricity cost. To incentivize users of data centers participate in the demand response programs, i.e., breaking the "split incentive" hurdle, some prior researches propose market-based mechanisms such as dynamic pricing and static monetary rewards. However, these mechanisms are either intrusive or unfair. In this paper, we use time-varying rewards to incentivize users, who have flexible deadlines and are willing to trading performance degradation for monetary rewards, grant time-shifting of their requests. With a game-theoretic framework, we model the game between a single data center and its users. Further, we extend our design via integrating it with two other emerging practical demand response strategies: server shutdown and local renewable energy generation. With real-world data traces, we show that a DC with our design can effectively shed its peak electricity load and overall electricity cost without reducing its profit, when comparing it with the current practice where no incentive mechanism is established.