Data centers are key participants in emergency demand response (EDR), where the grid coordinates large electricity consumers for reducing their consumption during emergency situations to prevent major economic losses. While existing literature concentrates on owner-operated data centers (e.g., Google), this work studies EDR in multi-tenant colocation data centers (e.g., Equinix) where servers are owned and managed by individual tenants and which are better targets of EDR. Existing EDR mechanisms incentivize tenants energy reduction. Such designs can either be gamed by strategic tenants or untrustworthy colocation operators for illegal gains. These serious privacy concerns stand as barrier preventing the tenants’ participation in EDR. This paper addresses such concerns by proposing a privacy-preserving and strategy-proof mechanism using the descending clock auction. Privacy is protected by implementing homomorphic encryption for aggregation through the clock auction, where operator can only know the aggregate of the tenants’ values or bids but not their individual private values or confidential information submitted to meet the EDR. We evaluate the privacy and performance of this scheme by formulating descending clock auction, in which the amount of energy/price the tenants are willing to reduce for a given price/energy to meet EDR is protected.

中文翻译：

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时钟拍卖启发隐私保护托管数据中心的紧急需求响应

数据中心是紧急需求响应 (EDR) 的关键参与者，电网协调大型电力消费者在紧急情况下减少其消耗，以防止重大经济损失。虽然现有文献集中在所有者运营的数据中心（例如 Google），但这项工作研究了多租户托管数据中心（例如 Equinix）中的 EDR，其中服务器由单个租户拥有和管理，并且是 EDR 的更好目标。现有的 EDR 机制激励租户节能。此类设计可能会被战略租户或不可信的托管运营商利用以获取非法收益。这些严重的隐私问题是阻碍租户参与 EDR 的障碍。本文通过提出使用降时钟拍卖的隐私保护和策略证明机制来解决这些问题。通过时钟拍卖实现聚合的同态加密来保护隐私，其中运营商只能知道租户价值或投标的聚合，而不能知道他们的个人私人价值或提交以满足 EDR 的机密信息。我们通过制定降时钟拍卖来评估该方案的隐私和性能，其中租户愿意为满足 EDR 的给定价格/能源而降低的能源/价格数量受到保护。运营商只能知道租户价值或出价的总和，而不能知道他们为满足 EDR 而提交的个人私人价值或机密信息。我们通过制定降时钟拍卖来评估该方案的隐私和性能，其中租户愿意为满足 EDR 的给定价格/能源而降低的能源/价格数量受到保护。运营商只能知道租户价值或出价的总和，而不能知道他们为满足 EDR 而提交的个人私人价值或机密信息。我们通过制定降时钟拍卖来评估该方案的隐私和性能，其中租户愿意为满足 EDR 的给定价格/能源而降低的能源/价格数量受到保护。