Strategy-proof Resource Pricing in Federated Systems

Resource sharing on the Internet is becoming increasingly pervasive. Recently, there is growing interest in federated systems where globally distributed and commoditized resources are traded, such as in peer-to-peer computing, grids, and cloud computing. An important issue in the allocation of shared resources in the context of large federated systems, such as federated clouds, is that users are rational and attempt to maximize their self-interest. In this thesis, we investigate the use of resource pricing with financial incentives to allocate shared resources when users are rational. Using mechanism design, we propose a strategy-proof, VCG-based resource pricing scheme, with provable economic properties that include individual rationality, incentive compatibility and budget balance. We show that multiple resource types per consumer request can be allocated to multiple resource providers with polynomial time complexity. Although we trade-off Pareto efficiency and obtain 80% optimal economic efficiency, we achieve strategyproof, budget balance and computational efficiency, and at the same time increase the number of allocations by 40% under different market conditions. To improve scalability, we propose a distributed auction scheme that leverages on a peer-to-peer DHT overlay network for resource lookups and distribute pricing by resource type. Simulations and experiments on PlanetLab show that the number of resource types in a consumer request does not affect the scalability of our distributed scheme, and the average allocation time increases logarithmically with the number of users. Lastly, in a federated cloud composed of four Amazon EC2 regions, we show using traces from the Amazon cloud that rational users with dynamic pricing increased user welfare by 10% over EC2 spot pricing. As an application of our pricing scheme, we have prototyped SkyBoxz, a federated cloud platform designed for cloud consumers to utilize and cloud providers to manage virtual machines across multiple public and private clouds. The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality. — Blaise Pascal List of Publications