Towards Efficient and Truthful Market Mechanisms for Double-Sided Cloud Markets

The increasingly growing supply and demand for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) makes cloud trading possible in an open exchange (OCX) marketplace. The mechanisms based on economic principles show promise in addressing the problem of efficient cloud resource provisioning in such a marketplace, including resources allocation and pricing. Therefore, this article proposes effective and efficient economics-inspired double-sided mechanisms, focussing on attaining the allocative efficiency and truthfulness. Given non-deterministic polynomial time (NP) complexity of the considered problem and the computational tractability requirement for the practical solutions, we design and evaluate the approximation mechanisms for such markets. We propose a combinatorial greedy allocation mechanism to determine the distribution of cloud resources based on the sorted order of allocation candidates. We design the pricing mechanisms that derive the buyer prices based on critical-value, and the seller payments are determined via a mixed surplus-distribution rule that relies on direct and proportional-value payment. The theoretical analysis of the economic properties proves that the proposed mechanisms maintain Budget-Balance (BB), Individual Rationality (IR), Computational Tractability (CT), and achieve Truthfulness (T) for single-minded buyers. The experimental investigation of the approximation quality and the seller strategic manipulation reveal near-optimal allocation performance and near-truthful strategic incentive in our pricing mechanisms.