A survey on geographic load balancing based data center power management in the smart grid environment

Power management is becoming an increasingly important issue for Internet services supported by multiple geo-distributed data centers. These data center's energy consumptions and costs are becoming unacceptably high, and placing a heavy burden on both energy resources and the environment. Emerging smart grid provides a feasible way for dynamic and efficient power management of data centers. Various power management methodologies based on geographic load balancing (GLB) have recently been proposed to effectively utilize several features of smart grid. In this paper, we summarize the motivations, current state of the art, approaches and techniques proposed in the recent research works in this discipline. In all of these works, many perspectives of power management have been addressed using various computer science principles. We specifically elaborate on how researchers are exploiting mathematical tools to address these perspectives. Finally, we point out subject matters that need more attentions from the research community and provide our vision on possible future works along this direction.