Auction-Based Resource Allocation Mechanism in Federated Cloud Environment: TARA

The growing market of cloud computing resulted in increased demand for cloud resources and it will become difficult for individual service providers (SPs) to fulfill all resource requests. That leads to a situation where two or more SPs may form a group (federation) and share the resources in order to fulfill the cloud users' demand and gain economic advantage. Now, due to the formation of more than one federations by different cloud providers, it may be difficult for users to select a suitable federation who can deliver cloud services at a fair price. In this context, it is necessary to have a framework that will efficiently allocate resources of cloud federations to the users at a fair price and stop market manipulation. In this article, we propose a multi-unit double auction mechanism called TARA (Truthful Double Auction for Resource Allocation) that can be used to efficiently choose cloud federations for users from which they can get resources. Here, we consider a multi-seller and multi-buyer double auction mechanism for heterogeneous resources, where every buyer submits their bids and every seller places their ask (the price of a resource that is offered by a federation). TARA achieves some important properties like truthfulness (also known as incentive compatibility), individual rationality and budget balance for both buyers and sellers. TARA is also computationally efficient and posses high system efficiency. The simulation results also show that total utility of buyer is more than some existing double auction mechanisms.