Profit-Driven Dynamic Cloud Pricing for Multiserver Systems Considering User Perceived Value

With the rapid deployment of cloud computing infrastructures, understanding the economics of cloud computing has becoming a pressing issue for cloud service providers. However, existing pricing models rarely consider the dynamic interaction between user requests and the cloud service provider, thus can not accurately reflect the law of supply and demand in marketing. In this paper, we first propose a dynamic pricing model based on the concept of user perceived value in the domain of economics that accurately captures the real supply and demand situation in the cloud service market. Subsequently, we design a profit maximization scheme based on the dynamic pricing model that optimizes profit of the cloud service provider without violating user service-level agreement. Finally, we propose a dynamic closed loop control scheme to adapt the cloud service price and multiserver configurations to the changes in cloud computing environment. Extensive experiments using data extracted from real-world applications validate the effectiveness of the proposed user perceived value-based pricing model and the dynamic profit maximization scheme. Our proposed profit maximization scheme achieves 31.32% and 22.76% more profit compared to two state of the art benchmarking methods, respectively.