Truthful Double Auction Based VM Allocation for Revenue-Energy Trade-Off in Cloud Data Centers

With the advances in virtualization technologies, cloud has emerged as a flexible and cost-effective service paradigm by provisioning on-demand VM resources to users via a pay-per-use business model. In cloud data centers, effective resource provisioning is required with the aim of minimizing energy consumption and maximizing cloud provider's revenue. However, the existing mechanisms have either focused on the optimization of energy, or the profit of cloud service provider (CSP) while incurring inefficient resource allocation. Thus to address these fundamental research challenges and to balance the trade-off between energy and revenue, we propose a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) based truthful double auction mechanism (TDAM). In this paper, first, we have formulated a joint optimization problem and prove it NP-hard by reducing it to a multi-dimensional bin-packing problem. Then we design TDAM, a truthful double auction scheme and propose an efficient winning bid algorithm for VM allocation and a VCG based mechanism for calculating payment of each bid. Being a double auction, TDAM allows both the buyers (VMs) and the sellers (PMs) to submit their bids and asks respectively, and performs allocation based on the energy consumption, while upholding truthfulness, in order to avoid falsification of the submitted bid or ask values. Through theoretical analysis and extensive experiments we show that the TDAM makes a significant contribution while maintaining truthfulness, individual rationality, economic efficiency, and has polynomial time complexity.