A truthful combinatorial double auction-based marketplace mechanism for cloud computing

Designing market-based mechanism that benefits both the cloud customer and cloud provider in a cloud market is a fundamental but complex problem. Double auction is one such mechanism to allocate resources that prevents monopoly and is used to design an unbiased optimal market strategy for cloud market. This work proposes a truthful combinatorial double auction mechanism for allocation and pricing of computing resources in cloud. For resource allocation, utilitarian social welfare maximization problem is formulated using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and a near optimal solution is obtained using Linear Programming based padded method. For payment, truthful and novel schemes are designed for both customers and providers. Moreover, the proposed mechanism is individual rational, computationally tractable, weakly budget-balance and asymptotic efficient. Performance evaluation and comparative study exhibit that the proposed mechanism is effective on various performance metrics such as utilitarian social welfare, total utility, customers' satisfaction, providers' revenue and hence is applicable in real cloud environments.