Stackelberg Game Approach for Energy-Aware Resource Allocation in Data Centers

Data centers hosting distributed computing systems consume huge amounts of electrical energy, contributing to high operational costs, whereas the utilization of data centers continues to be very low. Moreover, a data center generally consists of heterogeneous servers with different performance and energy. Failure to fully consider the heterogeneity of servers will lead to both sub-optimal energy saving and performance. In this study, we employ game theoretic approaches to model the problem of minimizing energy consumption as a Stackelberg game. In our model, the system monitor, who plays the role of the leader, can maximize profit by adjusting resource provisioning, whereas scheduler agents, who act as followers, can select resources to obtain optimal performance. In addition, we model the problem of minimizing average response time of tasks as a noncooperative game among decentralized scheduler agents as they compete with one another in the sharing resources. Several algorithms are presented to implement the game models. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique has immense potential to improve energy efficiency under dynamic work scenarios without compromising service level agreements.