Core-selecting auction-based mechanisms for service function chain provisioning and pricing in NFV markets

Abstract

With the rapid development of network function virtualization (NFV), an ever-increasing number of enterprises, businesses and operators are resorting to network service provisioning by means of the service function chains (SFCs). Toward this trend, NFV markets are emerging, where users rent SFCs from the network service provider (NSP) to execute their tasks, and the NSP uses the computation resources across geo-distributed clouds to construct various SFCs. Such NFV markets need well-designed pricing mechanisms for SFCs since the users have motivations to strategize around their payments. The Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) mechanism is a natural fit here, which can ensure that truthful bidding is a dominant strategy. However, VCG mechanism is susceptible to the problems of collusion and shill bidding. To address these problems, in this paper, we design a core-selecting auction-based mechanism (CSAM) for SFC provisioning and pricing in the NFV market. This mechanism considers dynamic provisioning, flexible deployment and reservation prices across geo-distributed clouds. Specifically, we first formulate the core of NFV auction, and prove that an in-core outcome can prevent collusion and shill bidding. Next, we use a couple of correlated linear program (LP) and quadratic program (QP) to design an in-core VCG-nearest payment algorithm, aiming to acquire an in-core outcome and minimize users’ incentives to bid untruthfully. Simulation results verify the strict theoretical analysis, and validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed CSAM.