STAR: Strategy-Proof Double Auctions for Multi-Cloud, Multi-Tenant Bandwidth Reservation

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computers 2015-07, Vol.64 (7), p.2071-2083
• Main Authors: Zheng, Zhenzhe, Gui, Yang, Wu, Fan, Chen, Guihai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Balancing; Bandwidth; Bandwidths; Budgeting; Cloud computing; Clouds; Computer simulation; Cost accounting; Indexes; Markets; Micro to mainframe links; Quality of service; Resource management; Spectrum allocation; Stars
• ISSN: 0018-9340; 1557-9956
• DOI: 10.1109/TC.2014.2346204

Bandwidth reservation has been recognized as a value-added service to the cloud provider in recent years. We consider an open market of cloud bandwidth reservation, in which cloud providers offer bandwidth reservation services to cloud tenants, especially online streaming service providers, who have strict requirements on the amount of bandwidth to guarantee their quality of services. In this paper, we model the open market as a double-sided auction, and propose the first family of STrategy-proof double Auctions for multi-cloud, multi-tenant bandwidth Reservation (STAR). STAR contains two auction mechanisms. The first one, STAR-Grouping, divides the tenants into groups by a bid-independent way, and carefully matches the cloud providers with the tenant groups to form good trades. The second one, STAR-Padding, greedily matches the cloud providers with the tenants, and fills the partially reserved cloud provider(s) with a novel virtual padding tenant who can be a component of the auctioneer. Our analysis shows that both of the two auction mechanisms achieve strategy-proofness and ex-post budget balance. Our evaluation results show that they achieve good performance in terms of social welfare, cloud bandwidth utilization, and tenant satisfaction ratio.