Automated negotiation with decommitment for dynamic resource allocation in cloud computing

We consider the problem of allocating networked resources in dynamic environment, such as cloud computing platforms, where providers strategically price resources to maximize their utility. Resource allocation in these environments, where both providers and consumers are selfish agents, presents numerous challenges since the number of consumers and their resource demand is highly dynamic. While numerous auction-based approaches have been proposed in the literature, this paper explores an alternative approach where providers and consumers automatically negotiate resource leasing contracts. Since resource demand and supply can be dynamic and uncertain, we propose a distributed negotiation mechanism where agents negotiate over both a contract price and a decommitment penalty, which allows agents to decommit from contracts at a cost. We compare our approach experimentally, using representative scenarios and workloads, to both combinatorial auctions and the fixed-price model used by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, and show that the negotiation model achieves a higher social welfare.