Energy-aware pricing for cloud services

Abstract

This paper considers the scenario of a cloud service market where multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are in operation and are competing against each other to attract and service the consumer's demand. We provide an analytical framework by considering the operational cost incurred by the CSP to construct an efficient pricing strategy for the services. We also account for the quality of service (QoS) offered and the prices other CSPs are charging. The pricing strategy we propose strikes a reasonable balance between charging too little which would result in irrationally low business profit and charging too much which would result in customer loss and thereby eventually loss of market share. We perform numerical simulations to validate the proposed pricing strategy and compare it with an oracle benchmark policy, with fair profit sharing among the CSPs and discuss the results.