Strategy-Proof Auction Mechanism with Group Price for Virtual Machine Allocation in Clouds

Market mechanism constitutes an efficient scheme for the allocation of cloud-based computing resources with the view of virtual machines. However, most of the existing mechanisms commonly use fixed price model and ignore flexible price model for the cloud providers. In this paper, we formulate the problem of virtual machine allocation in clouds as a combinatorial auction problem and propose a mechanism with group price to solve it, in which the cloud provider can express the discount price for each kind of traded virtual machine instances. We investigate the theoretical properties of the proposed mechanism including individual rationality, ex-post budget balance, and truthfulness. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed mechanism yields the allocation efficiency and computational tractability while generating higher revenue for the cloud providers than the mechanism with fixed price.