Inter-Data Center Network Dimensioning under Time-of-Use Pricing

In the cloud era, data centers consume tremendous power due to their huge computing and storage requirements. Furthermore, allocation and release of resources by numerous cloud customers leads to significant energy consumption at the data centers, which in turn, increases the Operational expenditures (Opex) of the operators. In this article, we combine energy efficiency and Time of Use (ToU)-awareness, and propose a novel virtualization scheme, namely ToU-aware Provisioning (ToUP) for an inter-data center network over an IP over WDM backbone. In ToUP, in addition to the traffic between two backbone nodes, upstream user demands destined to data centers and downstream data center demands originating from many data centers; inter-data center traffic is also considered for workload sharing between the data centers. Initially, we present an MILP formulation to model the optimal behavior of ToUP. Since the inter-data center network needs to be reconfigured in polynomial time, we propose a simulated annealing (SA)-based heuristic. We verify the heuristic by using the MILP solution as the benchmark. We evaluate ToUP under various scenarios, and numerical results confirm that significant Opex savings can be achieved while demands can be provisioned with low energy consumption in the data centers and network equipments.