The significantly high energy consumption of data centers constitutes a major load on the smart power grid. Data center demand response is a promising solution to incentivize the cloud providers to adapt their consumption to the power grid conditions. These policies not only mitigate the operational stability issues of the smart grid but also potentially decrease the electricity bills of cloud providers. Cloud providers can improve their contribution and reduce their energy cost through cooperation in the form of cloud federations.To this end, in this thesis we formulate and analysis the interaction between independent cloud providers and the smart grid in the context of the demand response programs. In this regard, first we model the interaction between the independent cloud providers and their corresponding smart grid utilities in an incentive-based demand response program. Leveraging the coalitional game theory, we present a distributed algorithm for federation formation among the cloud providers and analysis the effect of the federations on the clouds’ profits and on the smart grid performance through simulations. Simulation results show the effectiveness of cloud cooperation regarding their profit improvement compared to the non-cooperative case. However, the cloud cooperation does not improve the performance of all grid utilities. In the next step, we study this cooperation in the context of a dynamic electricity pricing scheme. To this end, and considering the mutual influences of the electricity prices and the federations formed, we have formulated the dynamic pricing process of the grid along with the cooperative workload management of providers, and modeled it as a two-stage Stackelberg game interleaved with a coalitional game, named interactive cooperative game (ICG). Simulation results showed that ICG improves the profit of the smart grid as well as the cloud providers compared to the non-cooperative case. Through simulations we showed that the processing overhead of proposed approaches is not significant. Keywords Cloud federation, data center, smart grid, demand response, energy management.
