Simulation and Modelling of a Multi-lane Double Auction Mechanism to Allocate Computational Resources in the Grid

Economic models have shown their suitability to allocate resources efficiently, considering an unbalanced supply and demand. As the use of the Grid is extending, a numerous set of distributed resource allocation frameworks have been developed to attain efficient resource management while keeping the scalability of the Grid. However, those frameworks make use of either simple double auction mechanisms or complex approximations to the NP-complete problem of the combinatorial auction. The problem of those mechanisms is that of its generality, that is, they have not been specially designed for the trading of time-leased computational resources. In this paper we present a novel variant of the double auction that has been specially adapted to trade time-differentiated resources as Grid resources can be considered. The paper presents the data structures, algorithms and architecture of the economic mechanism as well as it presents the evaluation of the mechanism through simulation. Simulated results are compared with the main double auction implementations found in the literature. The paper constitutes an approach to improve efficiency of resource allocation in the Grid from the point of view of the economic model and not from architectural aspects addressed by most of the contributions found in the literature.