Strategy-Proof Mechanism for Provisioning and Allocation Virtual Machines in Heterogeneous Clouds

In this paper, we address the problem of heterogeneous physical machines resource management (HPMRM); that is, providing and allocating multiple virtual machine (VM) instances from heterogeneous physical machines to maximize social welfare. Although existing allocation mechanisms allocate VMs to users through the single-mapping mechanism, such allocations cannot guarantee maximum social welfare or efficient utilization of multiple types of resources for cloud providers. Thus, we consider the multi-mapping mechanism, which permits mapping VMs allocated to one user to physical machines for VM provisioning and allocation. This can result in improved social welfare and lead to less resource fragmentation. We formulate the HPMRM problem in an auction-based setting, and design optimal and approximate mechanisms to solve it. In addition, we show that our proposed mechanism is strategy-proof; that is, our proposed mechanism drives the system into an equilibrium where no users have incentives to maximize their own profit by untruthfully reporting their requests. Furthermore, we analyze the approximation ratio of our proposed approximation algorithm. We also perform experiments to investigate the performance of our proposed approximation mechanism compared to the optimal mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approximation mechanism can obtain near optimal solutions and significantly improve allocation efficiency, while generating greater social welfare.