Combinatorial Auction-Based Mechanisms for VM Provisioning and Allocation in Clouds

Current cloud providers use fixed-price based mechanisms to allocate Virtual Machine (VM) instances to their users. The fixed-price based mechanisms do not provide an efficient allocation of resources and do not maximize the revenue of the cloud providers. A better alternative would be to use combinatorial auction-based resource allocation mechanisms. In this PhD dissertation we will design, study and implement combinatorial auction-based mechanisms for efficient provisioning and allocation of VM instances in cloud computing environments. We present our preliminary results consisting of three combinatorial auction-based mechanisms for VM provisioning and allocation. We also present an efficient bidding algorithm that can be used by the cloud users to decide on how to bid for their requested bundles of VM instances.