11,921 research outputs found
Extending Demand Response to Tenants in Cloud Data Centers via Non-intrusive Workload Flexibility Pricing
Participating in demand response programs is a promising tool for reducing
energy costs in data centers by modulating energy consumption. Towards this
end, data centers can employ a rich set of resource management knobs, such as
workload shifting and dynamic server provisioning. Nonetheless, these knobs may
not be readily available in a cloud data center (CDC) that serves cloud
tenants/users, because workloads in CDCs are managed by tenants themselves who
are typically charged based on a usage-based or flat-rate pricing and often
have no incentive to cooperate with the CDC operator for demand response and
cost saving. Towards breaking such "split incentive" hurdle, a few recent
studies have tried market-based mechanisms, such as dynamic pricing, inside
CDCs. However, such mechanisms often rely on complex designs that are hard to
implement and difficult to cope with by tenants. To address this limitation, we
propose a novel incentive mechanism that is not dynamic, i.e., it keeps pricing
for cloud resources unchanged for a long period. While it charges tenants based
on a Usage-based Pricing (UP) as used by today's major cloud operators, it
rewards tenants proportionally based on the time length that tenants set as
deadlines for completing their workloads. This new mechanism is called
Usage-based Pricing with Monetary Reward (UPMR). We demonstrate the
effectiveness of UPMR both analytically and empirically. We show that UPMR can
reduce the CDC operator's energy cost by 12.9% while increasing its profit by
4.9%, compared to the state-of-the-art approaches used by today's CDC operators
to charge their tenants
Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions
Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to
address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information
flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs
offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers,
involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems.
SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the
grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises
in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the
tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things
(IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the
generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by
incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as
well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such
devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG
systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes
of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues,
challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems
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