Heterogeneous Cloud Resources Management: Truthful Mechanism Design in Shared Multi-minded Users

Abstract

We address the problem of dynamic virtual machine provisioning and allocation of heterogeneous cloud resources. Existing works consider each user requests single bundle (single-minded), but a user may request multiple bundles (multi-minded). Thus, our object is to provide and allocate efficiently multiple VMs considering multi-minded setting to maximize social welfare. We formulate this problem in an auction-based setting and design optimal and approximation mechanisms. In addition, we show the approximation is \(\frac{a_{max}}{a_{min}}\sqrt{R\frac{c_{max}}{c_{min}}}+2\), where \(c_{max}\)/\(c_{min}\) is the maximum/minimum available resources, and \(a_{max}\)/\(a_{min}\) is the maximum/minimum requested resources. Furthermore, we show our proposed mechanisms are truthful, that is, they drive the system into an equilibrium where any user does not have incentives to maximize her own profit by untruthful value. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approximation mechanism gets the near-optimal allocation within a reasonable time whiling to giving the users incentives to report their true declarations.