Cost-aware Workload Dispatching and Server Provisioning for Distributed Cloud Data Centers

Abstract

As the demand on online services and cloud computing has kept increasing in recent years, the power usage and cost associated with cloud data centers’ operation have been uprising significantly. Most existing research focuses on reducing power consumption of data centers. However, the ultimate goal of cloud service operators is to reduce the total operating cost of data centers while guaranteeing the quality of service such as service delay to the end users. This paper exploits both the workload dispatching and the service provisioning to address the total electricity cost minimization problem. This problem is formulated as a hierarchical capacitated median model based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP) technique. Extensive evaluations based on real-life electricity price data for multiple data centers show the efficiency and efficacy of our approach.