Bid-Price Control for Energy-Aware Pricing of Cloud Services

The amount of electrical energy consumed by Cloud computing resources keeps rising continuously. To exploit the full potential of reducing the carbon footprint, technical optimization of data center load and cooling distribution is not sufficient. We propose a method that motivates Cloud service providers to invest in energy-efficient infrastructure, which then allows for increasing revenue. The differentiation between conventional and green services offers the possibility to apply price discrimination approaches known from Revenue Management literature. Applying bid-price controlled pricing for the provider’s decision on accepting an incoming request bears the potential of increased revenue. We demonstrate the efficacy of the developed artifact through an experimental evaluation for various settings of supply and demand.