Truthful VNFI Procurement Mechanisms With Flexible Resource Provisioning in NFV Markets

Abstract

With the rapid development of network function virtualization (NFV), more and more enterprises and operators are seeking network service provisioning via service chains of virtual network functions (VNFs), instead of depending on proprietary hardware appliances. Following this trend, an NFV market is emerging, where users can procure different VNF instances (VNFIs) and their combinations from multiple network service providers (NSPs) in a pay-as-you-go way. In such a procurement process, how to guarantee truthfulness while enabling flexible resource provisioning in form of VNFIs is a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a truthful reverse combinatorial auction-based mechanism to solve the combinatorial VNFI procurement problem. To support flexible resource provisioning, this mechanism allows NSPs to be multi-minded, and determine the provisioning VNFIs according to the auction results. Specifically, we design a heuristic algorithm to determine the winning bids in polynomial time. Furthermore, we devise a critical-payment-based pricing algorithm to induce NSPs to disclose their real costs, aiming to achieve truthfulness. Rigorous theoretical analysis shows the proposed mechanism can guarantee truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency. Simulation results also verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed mechanism.