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EdgeDR: An Online Mechanism Design for Demand Response in Edge Clouds

The computing frontier is moving from centralized mega datacenters towards distributed cloudlets at the network edge. We argue that cloudlets are well-suited for handling power demand response to help the grid maintain stability due to more flexible workload management attributed to their distributed nature. However, they also require computing demand response to avoid overload and maintain reliability. To this end, we propose a novel online market mechanism, EdgeDR, to achieve cost efficiency in edge demand response programs. At a high level, we observe that the cloudlet operator can dynamically switch on/off entire cloudlets to compensate for the energy reduction required by the power grid or provide enough computing resources to the edge service. We formulate a long-term social cost minimization problem and decompose it into a series of one-round procurement auctions. In each auction instance, we propose to let the cloudlet tenants bid with cost functions of their two-dimension service quality degradation tolerance, and let the cloudlet operator choose the service quality, manage the workload, and schedule the cloudlet activation status. In addition, we present a dynamic payment mechanism for the operator to balance the tradeoff between short-term profit and long-term benefit in more practical scenarios. Via rigorous analysis, we exhibit that our bidding policy is individually rational and truthful; our workload management algorithm has near-optimal performance in each auction; and our overall online algorithm achieves a provable competitive ratio. We further confirm the performance of our mechanism through extensive trace-driven simulations.