Incentive-Driven QoS for Ephemeral Virtual Clouds

Cloud resources like Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine have become an integral part of our life with their pay-per-use pricing models. On the other hand, attempts have also been made to create virtual clouds on the fly using available devices in the locality like smartphones and tablets. Such devices being equipped with powerful processors, this is a novel method of utilizing their normally unused computational capabilities. We attempt to design and develop a pricing model for such resources created for opportunistic computing. Since the values of the resources in these virtual clouds cannot be calculated, the pay-per-resource model has to give way to a pay-per-effort model. We model the scenario as a principal-agent problem with moral hazards and propose an incentive-driven Quality of Service (QoS) to ensure that the agents act appropriately. In view of the short contractual duration, we consider only deterministic contracts which are easy to understand and implement. We show that the mobile devices can be modeled as economic actors in a contractual arrangement and discuss how the optimal decisions are identified.