Breaking the split incentive hurdle via time-varying monetary rewards

Demand response is widely employed by today's data centers to response to the increasing of electricity cost. To incentivize users of data centers participate in the demand response programs, i.e., breaking the split incentive hurdle, some prior researches proposed market-based mechanisms such as dynamic pricing and static monetary rewards. However, these mechanisms are either intrusive or unfair. In this paper, we use time-varying rewards to incentivize users of data centers grant time-shifting of their requests. With a game-theoretic framework, we model/analyze the game between a single data center and its users. Further, we extend our design via integrating it with another emerging practical demand response strategies: server shutdown or local renewable energy generation. With real-world data traces, we show that a data center with our design can effectively shed its peak electricity load and overall electricity cost without reducing its profit, when compared with the current practice where no incentive mechanism is established.