A Nash Bargaining Approach to Emergency Demand Response in Colocation Data Centers

Abstract

Data centers are recognized as promising resources for emergency demand response (EDR) that requires a certain amount of power reduction when system reliability is in danger. In this paper, we study EDR in a colocation data center where multiple tenants deploy their own servers in a shared space managed by a data center operator. While the data center operator desires to reduce the usage of expensive and environmentally unfriendly backup generation during EDR events, the tenants who can control their servers have little incentive to reduce their power consumption. To enable cost-effective and eco-friendly EDR, the data center operator has to properly incentivize the tenants to modulate server power consumption. Furthermore, the social welfare generated during EDR should be properly shared among the data center operator and tenants so that all of them are satisfied. We propose an approach based on the Nash bargaining solution, which is Pareto efficient, fair and social welfare maximizing, to incentivize the tenants' participation and allocate the social welfare among the data center operator and tenants properly. Trace-driven simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.