Dynamic Resource Pricing on Federated Clouds

Current large distributed systems allow users to share and trade resources. In cloud computing, users purchase different types of resources from one or more resource providers using a fixed pricing scheme. Federated clouds, a topic of recent interest, allows different cloud providers to share resources for increased scalability and reliability. However, users and providers of cloud resources are rational and maximize their own interest when consuming and contributing shared resources. In this paper, we present a dynamic pricing scheme suitable for rational users requests containing multiple resource types. Using simulations, we compare the efficiency of our proposed strategy-proof dynamic scheme with fixed pricing, and show that user welfare and the percentage of successful requests is increased by using dynamic pricing.