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A truthful online mechanism for virtual machine provisioning and allocation in clouds

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Abstract

We address the problem of online virtual machine (VM) provisioning and allocation with multiple types of resources. Formulating this problem in an auction-based setting, we propose an accurate mathematical model incorporating the ability to preempt and resume a given task for the sake of best overall use of resources. Our objective is to efficiently provide and allocate multiple VMs to maximize social welfare and encourage users to declare truthful requests. We first design an offline optimal mechanism based on the VCG mechanism; this mechanism has full knowledge of all users and offers ideal solutions. We also design an online greedy mechanism that considers only current knowledge while offering near-optimal solutions instead. Our proposed greedy mechanism consists of winner determination and payment algorithms. Furthermore, we show that the winner determination algorithm is monotonic and that the payment algorithm implements the critical payment. Both our allocation methods offer incentives to users providing true values for the sake of obtaining the best utility. We performed extensive experiments to investigate the performance of our proposed greedy mechanism compared to the optimal mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed greedy mechanism obtains near-optimal solutions in a reasonable time.

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Data availability

The datasets used or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Chinese Natural Science Foundation under Grant 11361048, in part by the Yunnan Natural Science Foundation under Grant 2017FH001-014, in part by the Yunnan Science Foundation under Grant 2019J0613, and in part by the Qujing Normal University Science Foundation under Grant ZDKC2016002.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Engineering, Qujing Normal University, Qujing, China

    Xi Liu

  2. Institute of Applied Mathematics, Qujing Normal University, Qujing, China

    Jun Liu

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  1. Xi Liu
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  2. Jun Liu
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Xi Liu and Jun Liu. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xi Liu.

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Liu, X., Liu, J. A truthful online mechanism for virtual machine provisioning and allocation in clouds. Cluster Comput 25, 1095–1109 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-021-03499-7

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