A truthful online mechanism for virtual machine provisioning and allocation in clouds

We address the problem of online virtual machine (VM) provisioning and allocation with multiple types of resources. Formulating this problem in an auction-based setting, we propose an accurate mathematical model incorporating the ability to preempt and resume a given task for the sake of best overall use of resources. Our objective is to efficiently provide and allocate multiple VMs to maximize social welfare and encourage users to declare truthful requests. We first design an offline optimal mechanism based on the VCG mechanism; this mechanism has full knowledge of all users and offers ideal solutions. We also design an online greedy mechanism that considers only current knowledge while offering near-optimal solutions instead. Our proposed greedy mechanism consists of winner determination and payment algorithms. Furthermore, we show that the winner determination algorithm is monotonic and that the payment algorithm implements the critical payment. Both our allocation methods offer incentives to users providing true values for the sake of obtaining the best utility. We performed extensive experiments to investigate the performance of our proposed greedy mechanism compared to the optimal mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed greedy mechanism obtains near-optimal solutions in a reasonable time.