Double Auction for Resource Allocation in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing has become more and more popular as more companies choose to deploy their services and applications to the cloud. Particularly, trading unused cloud resources provides extra profits for companies with rapidly changing needs. Cloud market enables trading additional resource between buyers and sellers, where a buyer may have different valuations for different instances of the same resource due to factors such as geographical location, configuration, etc. In this paper, we study double auctions with non-identical items for cloud resource allocation, and develop a framework to decompose the design of truthful double auctions. We propose two auctions based on the framework that achieve: (i) truthfulness; (ii) individual rationality; and (iii) budget balance. We prove that the social welfare is constant-competitive to the (not necessarily truthful) optimal auction under certain distributions. We run simulations to investigate the social welfare achieved by our auctions. We use different probability distributions to capture various scenarios in the real world. Results show that our mechanisms generally achieve at least half of the optimal social welfare, while one auction achieves over a 0.9 fraction of the optimal in some circumstances.