A Double Auction Mechanism to Bridge Users’ Task Requirements and Providers’ Resources in Two-Sided Cloud Markets

Double auction-based pricing model is an efficient pricing model to balance users’ and providers’ benefits. Existing double auction mechanisms usually require both users and providers to bid with the unit price and the number of VMs. However, in practice users seldom know the exact number of VMs that meets their task requirements, which leads to users’ task requirements inconsistent with providers’ resource. In this paper, we propose a truthful double auction mechanism, including a matching process as well as a pricing and VM allocation scheme, to bridge users’ task requirements and providers’ resources in two-sided cloud markets. In the matching process, we design a cost-aware resource algorithm based on Lyapunov optimization techniques to precisely obtain the number of VMs that meets users’ task requirements. In the pricing and VM allocation scheme, we apply the idea of second-price auction to determine the final price and the number of provisioned VMs in the double auction. We theoretically prove our proposed mechanism is individual-rational, truthful and budget-balanced, and analyze the optimality of proposed algorithm. Through simulation experiments, the results show that the individual profits achieved by our algorithm are 12.35 and 11.02 percent larger than that of scale-out and greedy scale-up algorithms respectively for 90 percent of users, and the social welfare of our mechanism is only 7.01 percent smaller than that of the optimum mechanism in the worst case.