Sharrukh Zaman , Wayne State University, Detroit
Daniel Grosu , Wayne State University, Detroit
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TCC.2013.9
Cloud computing providers provision their resources into different types of virtual machine (VM) instances which are then allocated to the users for specific periods of time. The allocation of VM instances to users is usually determined through fixed-price allocation mechanisms which cannot guarantee an economically efficient allocation and the maximization of cloud provider's revenue. A better alternative would be to use combinatorial auction-based resource allocation mechanisms. This argument is supported by the economic theory; when the auction costs are low, as is the case in the context of cloud computing, auctions are especially efficient over the fixed-price markets since products are matched to customers having the highest valuation. The existing combinatorial auction-based VM allocation mechanisms do not take into account the user's demand when making provisioning decision, that is, they assume that the VM instances are statically provisioned. We design an auction-based mechanism for dynamic VM provisioning and allocation that takes into account the user demand when making provisioning decisions. We prove that our mechanism is truthful (i.e., a user maximizes its utility only by bidding its true valuation for the requested bundle of VMs). We evaluate the proposed mechanism by performing extensive simulation experiments using real workload traces.
Resource management, Virtualization, Dynamic scheduling, Cost accounting, Computational modeling, Economics, VM Allocation, VM Provisioning, Combinatorial Auctions
Sharrukh Zaman, Daniel Grosu, "A Combinatorial Auction-Based Mechanism for Dynamic VM Provisioning and Allocation in Clouds", IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, , no. 1, pp. 1, PrePrints PrePrints, doi:10.1109/TCC.2013.9