A Truthful Auction-based Mechanism for Virtual Resource Allocation and Pricing in Clouds

A major challenge faced by the cloud providers is to design an efficient mechanism for virtual resource allocation and pricing. We formulate the virtual resource allocation problem in cloud computing as an integer program and design a truthful auction-based mechanism that solve it. Our proposed mechanism enables the cloud providers to effectively utilize their virtual resources and obtain higher profits. We design a heuristic allocation algorithm in which each user can submit multiple requirements. In addition, we design a payment algorithm which takes into account the interests of both the cloud providers and the users. We perform extensive simulation experiments using real workload traces in terms of social welfare, execution time, and resource utilization. We show that our proposed mechanism achieves promising results for virtual resource allocation.