Truthful mechanism design for bin packing with applications on cloud computing

Abstract

In this paper, we study a mechanism design for the bin packing problem, which can model a reversed auction on cloud computing. A cloud computing platform has a set of jobs and would like to rent VM instances to process these jobs from cloud providers. In the auction model, each cloud provider (agent) who owns VM instances will submit a bid on the costs for using such VM instances. The mechanism determines the number of VM instances from each agent, and payments that have to be paid for using the chosen VM instances. The utility of an agent is the payment received minus the true cost. Our proposed mechanism is a deterministic truthful mechanism that the utility of each agent is maximized by revealing the true cost. Next, we provide the analysis of the approximation ratios, and then run experiments using both realistic workload and uniformly random data to show the performance of the proposed mechanisms.