An online valuation-based sealed winner-bid auction game for resource allocation and pricing in clouds

Cloud computing is able to allocate different resources as virtual machines (VMs) to users, who need only pay for the amount of resources used. Two of the challenges in clouds are resource allocation and pricing in such a way to satisfy both cloud providers and users. Existing allocation and pricing mechanisms cannot guarantee increased profits due to various reasons. A better solution to increase the satisfaction of both parties, which is supported by economic theory, is the employment of auction-based allocation and pricing mechanisms. In these mechanisms, cloud resources and services are awarded based on the highest bids, while winners receive the quality of services expected. However, most existing auction-based mechanisms are inefficient and cannot be used in real clouds due to high computational or communication overhead, the bid function’s time complexity, and/or its inaccurate estimates. In the present paper, a lightweight mechanism is introduced which can be utilized in the real-world application of clouds. The currently proposed mechanism is a winner-bid auction game that seals users’ bids by a multi-criteria valuation-based bid function and sends them to the auctioneer. During scheduling, the auctioneer awards VMs exclusively to users with the highest bids. The presented approach is an online auction whose main aim is to increase the profits of the provider and user from different criteria. While determining the Nash equilibrium, the current study specifies the prices to be paid by users in various cases and proves the truthfulness of the proposed method. Finally, the effectiveness of the presented mechanism is examined through extensive experiments on different simulation scenarios and actual workload data.