Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Combinatorial Auction-Based Virtual Machine Provisioning And Allocation In Clouds, Sharrukh Zaman

Wayne State University Dissertations

Current cloud providers use fixed-price based mechanisms to allocate Virtual Machine (VM) instances to their users. But economic theory states that when there are large amount of resources to be allocated to large number of users, auctions are the most efficient allocation mechanisms. Auctions achieve efficiency of allocation and also maximize the providers' revenue, which a fixed-price based mechanism is unable to do. We argue that combinatorial auctions are best suited for the problem of VM provisioning and allocation in clouds, since they provide the users with the most flexible way to express their requirements. In combinatorial auctions, users bid …